On Sex
by Lotos-Eater
Summary: With titles like this, who needs summaries?
1. Chapter 1

**On Sex**

With titles like this, who needs summaries?

By Lotos-Eater

Beta-reader V-chan2k6

**Author's Note**: Am not big on notes, but it needs to be said: this is not a happy waffy flufftime story, so please do not read it with that expectation. This story will have 3 chapters. Many thanks to my beta.

1

* * *

><p>One of the truly annoying things about Kiba (and there were many, <em>many <em>things to choose from on that list) was that it was difficult to lie to him about certain subjects. Much in the same way that it was difficult for anyone to lie to Neji himself. Neji had been trained to recognize the change in pulse, facial tics, microscopic sweat, and other visual indicators that people with ordinary eyes wouldn't notice. Because he was a Hyuuga and their abilities were common knowledge for most everyone in Konoha, people usually told him the truth or didn't talk to him at all. With Kiba, though – you didn't even need to open your mouth and he knew you were hiding something, because he could smell it.

The mission team consisted of Kiba, Choji, and some new chunin named Kojo who appeard to have made that fresh wound on his neck on purpose, possibly so he could look like a real ninja. Neji was captain, and he knew that Kiba was going to be a problem before they got ten feet out of the gate, because he heard him snicker, then whisper. And when he stopped and looked back, Kiba was snickering again, and Choji's face was bright red. Kojo was looking on with deep interest.

"Do you have something to say, Inuzuka?" Neji asked. He had a feeling he knew what was coming.

"Yeah - Since when were you boning your teammate?" Kiba replied, feigning a casual air.

At this remark the chunin named Kojo burst out into short laughter, which was quickly silenced by a stony look from Neji.

Choji's face remained red, although he looked at his team leader with sheepish curiosity.

Neji stared Kiba directly in the eyes. For a dog, that was a challenge. Kiba backed down first. On a very basic level, Kiba knew who was in charge, and he was a ninja – you couldn't have a team of ninja without authority, and you couldn't have that without respect. The whole thing went down silently. The way it would, Neji imagined, with dogs.

But it was a fact that it was no use lying to Kiba, or trying to hide the truth. So his only options were to ignore it and move on, which would leave the topic open to speculation, or acknowledge it and move on, which might be unexpected enough to shut Kiba up.

"If you have a moral objection to premarital sex," Neji said, completely straight-faced, "kindly keep it to yourself."

This time Choji laughed – briefly.

"We are moving out," Neji said, and he turned to lead them forward again.

Although they were moving quickly through the forest, Kiba couldn't let the matter rest for long – it was impossible to remain quiet and to continue being Kiba. "Seriously, dude, are you nuts? I heard she cut off a guy's junk once. With a serrated sword."

Neji, who knew this to be true, didn't reply.

"You a masochist or something?"

"No."

"Then you're either really brave or really, _really _fucked-up."

Neji wouldn't argue with either one of those assessments. In truth, he found that both statements applied pretty equally to most good ninja.

Kojo spent the rest of the mission regarding his leader with wary respect.

* * *

><p>He was fucked-up pretty much from the beginning, psychologically. He'd gotten to a point in his life, now, where he could look back on his childhood and say that honestly. As a small child he'd had complete hero-worship for his father, the only parent he remembered, and that had turned into utter hatred for the unfair world, for the unfair <em>family, <em>when his father was killed. The self-governed nature of his father's death was not clear to Neji until many years after the fact. So, as a result, to repeat: pretty much fucked-up.

He never thought much of his classmates at the Academy – compared to the unmarred perfection of his dead father, everyone paled. He had no friends. In another world it might have been a bad thing to be a sociopath, but here in a ninja village it was the optimal way to go. Get ahead of the crowd: have no emotional attachment to humans. Instead of noting what a strange boy he was, the villagers just admired him for being at the top of his class. Girls _liked _him for what he was. Obsessive, single-minded, determined: these were qualities of the ideal ninja. An ordinary village might make him an outcast, but to Konoha, he was seen to have great potential.

He felt about his genin team the same things that he felt toward his classmates: they were inferior. So far inferior that he made it a point to interact with them as little as possible. He took turns beating up Lee and Tenten, and when he fought with his sensei, he only grudgingly admitted to himself that the man had strength. But Neji firmly believed that when he grew up and became a full-fledged Hyuuga, his sensei would be no match for him. Fate ruled things like this. Neji was made to feel inferior by his clan, because of his Branch family status, and therefore Neji was only satisfied by showing others they were inferior to him.

And then his first chunin exams came, and everything he'd ever learned about life flew out the window. First he was defeated by someone who was clearly inferior in all ways, and then his uncle slipped into his recovery room and tore apart his world view, word by word. It was a beautiful, horrible day.

Nothing changed overnight. Nothing ever did, not when it was change that lasted. The truth stayed with him, though, and things started to take on different colors. At first he only went on the defensive, analyzing his failure. As soon as he realized how badly he had underestimated his opponent, he decided to never let such a thing happen again. So he studied Lee, and he learned to be afraid of the way Lee didn't _stop; _because Lee would fight literally until his death, if you let him, and would do so at the least provocation. If it ever got to a point in one of their battles where Neji ran out of chakra, he knew he was a dead man.

And he studied Tenten, to a lesser extent. At first he didn't consider her much of a threat. Like him, she was mostly quiet and single-minded: she wanted to be a good ninja. (Was there anything else worth being?) But in his estimation at the time she didn't have any innate talent like he did, or even like their sensei, and she lacked Lee's borderline insane dedication. Her skills were limited. Back when their team was young, he'd assumed that it was because she'd come from a civilian family – but when he cared enough to look into her background, he learned that this wasn't true. She came from one of the lesser shinobi clans, she just chose not to trade on their name. At her own request, right on their first day as a team, Gai-sensei recorded her name on the ninja registry as _Tenten, _only Tenten. No one learned why this was so important to her until much later.

They got to be friends.

It was completely unintentional. Although she smiled a lot, she wasn't one of the girls that liked to flirt with him, and he couldn't care less about her, at least at the beginning. They just worked together often, and did so in almost complete silence, communicating whatever needed to be said in as few words as possible. "Tomorrow?" she would say.

"Early. I have a mission with Shino."

"Six, then."

"Fine."

"Taijutsu?"

"Fine. But I have a new ninjutsu to practice as well."

"Okay," she said, and smiled the way she always did, cheerfully and benignly. (You could be fooled by that smile, if you knew her less, because she could kill a person when she needed to. Her smiles were warm and honest and untroubled, and she gave them freely to everyone, friend or foe.)

Their sensei and other genin teammate were not so succinct. It tried their patience. They commiserated, usually with silent gazes of mutual humiliation while Gai-sensei and Lee did something embarrassing in public. Their friendship was, in a way, inevitable. Even so, neither one would have recognized that such a relationship existed. Partly because it would have been so strange to say, "she is my friend," and partly because no one was going to ask.

Time changed a lot of things. He grew out of his angst, mostly, even as a young teenager, and with that out of the way, he started his flight up through the ranks. To help him find his way now that fate was no longer guiding him, he took to meditating for huge chunks of the day several times a week, and as an unintentional result he began to look at his family differently. He sometimes even engaged his cousin in simple conversation. "Have you mastered that technique you were trying earlier this week?"

"No, not yet, Neji-nii-san."

"Would you like to practice today?"

"I would like that very much, nii-san. I am very grateful."

He no longer looked at his uncle with loathing and dread – because when he thought of his uncle now, there just wasn't any of that emotion left. He searched for it in meditation, and he only found the empty stories he'd told himself when he was little – his father the hero, his uncle the demon. The truth was much more complicated – and much more interesting. The primary feeling that he had when thinking of his uncle now was curiosity. He tried to understand what it must have been like to be the man at that end of the Hyuuga world. And when he had considered it, he felt a little bit of pity, too.

And, in time, he turned into a person who could not honestly be described as a sociopath. He was quiet, and he was still single-minded, but he had a better idea of why he existed, why this village existed, why his clan existed, what they were fighting for.

He started paying attention to small inanimate things, like the way the maid always folded his shirts with the arms crossing each other at exactly the same angle every day, or the way the light from the screen window slanted across the Hyuuga dojo in the late afternoon. He noticed things about people, as well. His uncle's worry lines becoming more defined, but also the way his uncle's expression when he looked at Hinata slowly changed over the years. Then there was little Hanabi's vibrant blossoming. Hinata's quiet, determined quest for her true love. Eventually, Neji realized that most everything around him was a story, if one looked close enough.

Lee's unrelenting perseverance. His sensei's love for his village, untarnished even after all his experience. And Tenten. Tenten was a lot like him, still. But she tended to slip away when you didn't notice. She was made for the background – she was an excellent spy. She blended into the crowd and vanished with a quiet smile.

And then one day, when they were fourteen, she took center stage in her own story. Gripping the hilt of her sword, she said, "This is my battle." She cast off her teammates and went to meet her fate.

* * *

><p>Not too long after that, when they were fifteen, the two spent an afternoon training together, which was nothing out of the usual, and ended the day with a good set of fights – again, nothing out of the usual.<p>

Neji often won, but if they decided to fight without any chakra techniques, Tenten was more likely to win. She was never going to have the abilities of his eyes or hands, but if he was low on chakra, he knew to expect a difficult battle. He had learned the error of underestimation the hard way, many times. Even without a weapon, she was a good match. What she lacked in sheer strength she made up for with creativity, which Tenten had in droves, especially when she couldn't reach one of her usual weapons.

The afternoon ended, they stretched, and they packed up their gear. Then they walked back to the village together. So far, still normal: this was how they ended many days. The sun was going down through the trees behind their backs and Neji decided he liked the golden color it lent the bark, the grass, even the pink of the sky. It was the last warmth before the dark. The path back to the village was well-worn by many generations of shinobi – a comfortable place.

"I want to ask you something," Tenten said.

"Hn," he answered neutrally.

"I want your help with something. Would you be willing to have sex with me?"

… Remarkably, he was able to keep walking forward, his gait even.

She said this without a single catch in her voice, or stutter, although he got the impression that this was due to a lot of effort on her part. He kept his shock well hidden, and his guard was up immediately. A ninja had to learn to expect the unexpected, and this was dangerous and unfamiliar territory. "Why would you want to do that?"

"Because I'm afraid of it. And it's silly, really. Gai-sensei says we have to overcome our fears, right? Face them. Might as well get it over with."

He was very careful about his reply. "Gai-sensei also says that such things can take time."

"Yes, well – we've got time. I don't want to do it all at once. I want to work up to it, like you would work up to any other technique. I think it will take several weeks."

"Hn."

He was silently amazed at himself for not trying to reason with her, but his mind had just been drained of any coherent thought. He didn't say anything else for a minute. Then: "Where?" he asked.

"At my place, of course. Yours wouldn't be practical, with all those prying eyes."

"That is true."

She had her own apartment – she had lived alone, in one place or another, ever since that incident when they were fourteen, when she was shunned by her clan.

This made things convenient. Almost too convenient. He was sure it could not be so simple. "Just sex?" he asked.

"Just sex, I swear. I'm not one of your fangirls, Neji."

He would never accuse her of such a thing. But that wasn't the issue. "If you agree that, regardless of the outcome, we will continue to work together as always, then yes."

"Oh, that goes without saying."

"Very well."

"Okay."

The distance between them as they walked next to each other, he noticed, didn't change, but all of a sudden he was very aware of its value: a meter, almost exactly.

"You want to come over tonight?" she asked. "After dinner?"

"All right."

* * *

><p>The day, back when they were fourteen, had been spent on team training, except their sensei hadn't been there – he was on some kind of taijutsu training detail back at the Academy, teaching snot-nosed eight-year-olds how to kick properly. Lee, in his sensei's absence, was repeatedly kicking the training post as if it had slandered his mother. Neji and Tenten were discussing the mission they'd been assigned for the next day. (Guard a convoy. Standard stuff.)<p>

Suddenly Neji felt a presence in the woods, approaching the training field, and he knew that Tenten sensed it, too, by the way the muscles in her shoulders suddenly tightened. Lee continued kicking his post, but unbeknownst to an onlooker he was aware of his teammates – he sensed their tension. A keen observer would have noted that, although Lee kept kicking, his occasional exclamations had stopped.

Neji wasn't going to acknowledge the presence. He assumed it was some chunin or jonin of the village coming to check them out – they often did. Team Gai had earned certain notoriety, even at that age.

Tenten, though, stood up after a few seconds of silence and faced it, almost as if she had been expecting the visitor. Her eyes were steely and cool, and a calmness had come over her, one that Neji automatically recognized: she was getting ready to fight. Because she'd acknowledged a threat, he stood up beside her, and a moment later Lee was beside him, too, facing this unknown.

A figure appeared at the edge of the clearing. It was a man Neji did not know. Middle-aged, clearly a ninja. Brown hair thinning at the top, simple clothing. Konoha headband. Neji thought he'd seen the man in the village, once or twice – just another jonin.

He wasn't worried, and he knew Lee was only curious – the boy's posture screamed, even when he didn't – but Tenten changed as the man approached. Her eyes set. Her posture forcibly relaxed. She was definitely getting ready for a fight.

"Tenten-chan," the man said, when they were within speaking distance. "May I have a word?"

She didn't even turn her head to either of her teammates. She just said to them, "Leave us. This is my battle."

Neji was tempted to remind her that they needed to stay in top form for the mission tomorrow, and bouts like this, whatever it was, could wait until after, but he knew that Tenten wouldn't accept it. She could be obstinate about certain things. She was getting ready to fight, and she was going to fight.

For some reason, though, just as he made up his mind to leave, Neji had a terrible feeling of premonition. It was something about the coldness of Tenten's voice, or the heavy, concentrated gaze of the strange man. Neji glanced at Lee quickly, and then both of them leapt back, leaving Tenten to face her enemy alone.

A hundred yards back on a tree limb overlooking the training field, they stopped together. "Do you know what is going on?" Lee asked him.

"No. But I have a bad feeling. Go and get sensei. I will stay here."

Lee nodded and vanished. Neji watched his kunoichi teammate and the unwelcome guest on Team Gai's training field. Neither one seemed to be aware of his presence. They spoke a few words that he couldn't hear, and he didn't think to try to lip-read because he was paying too much attention to their postures. When the man attacked, it was sudden and vicious, but Tenten had been prepared for such a thing all along. She moved fluidly with his strike, like Gai-sensei had taught her. The man was indeed a jonin, and moved like one, and had a katana that looked to be of high quality – being on a team with Tenten, Neji knew a thing or two about weapons. Tenten fought passionately and gracefully, her face a blank slate, instinctive reactions so buried that they could not disrupt her perfect aim. Neji felt a need to help his teammate, but he sensed that this fight was important to her and his intervention would not be welcome. And so far there was nothing to signify that the fight wouldn't end like so many fights on the training fields did – with one party overcome, conceding victory. This was a Konoha jonin, after all, not some foreigner.

When, through slick speed and working a couple minor advantages to her favor, she had overpowered the man, leaving him prone on his back, Neji thought it was over and breathed a very small sigh of relief. Sensei would wonder why they'd bothered him…

But the jonin did not concede – he sprang again as soon as she let her guard down, and suddenly the fight took on a whole new tone. With a start, Neji saw blood and wasn't sure whose it was, but there was plenty of it. He couldn't immediately tell if the man was wounded and bleeding on Tenten or if it was the other way around. He sprang down from his perch on the tree limb and approached them covertly, slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes activated. He finally saw that it was Tenten who was hurt, and it shocked him – she wasn't stopping to concede or bandage the wound, like she would in a spar – she was still fighting, and was pouring as much energy and chakra into it as she would give in combat that meant life or death. Any normal battle on the training field would end with a wound like that. Tenten didn't look like she was fighting a normal training spar, or even a serious battle like she had done recently at the latest chunin exam – the way she was flying full throttle said that this was as critical as a mission fight. There was no practice or show involved in it; they were each out for some kind of kill.

Neji decided that whatever was happening, it had to be stopped. He started looking for openings. But even when he saw them, he couldn't quite bring himself to interfere – because it was Tenten's fight, whatever it was, and it was clearly important to her. It made him think of the first time he'd really sparred with his uncle – the feeling of years and years of hatred boiling out of his gut and giving him energy. And the sensation when he had gained the upper hand for a moment had been such an incredible blast of victory.

Tenten was clearly winning now, and Neji felt less and less inclined to stop the fight… although she seemed somewhat out of control. She'd let go of her careful composure and her face had stiffened into a totally unfamiliar mask of rage. She was fighting with one of her own katanas now, and her moves lacked their usual finesse – instead of precise and graceful, she was clearly fighting mad, and with malicious intent.

When she won, finally and definitively, it happened too fast for Neji to do anything about it, although he probably would have hesitated anyway. Suddenly there was much more blood - and screaming so intense and piercing that even Neji blanched. Tenten seemed to be in shock, staring at her reddened blade and shaking, while her foe writhed on the ground in blind agony.

And Neji wasn't sure whether to help his teammate or help the man who was possibly dying. Luckily, that was when Gai-sensei appeared.

* * *

><p>The man was her uncle, the heir of her clan, and as a result of the fight he was left permanently castrated, and she was shunned and disowned.<p>

It didn't seem to matter to her father or the other select members of her clan who heard her story that her uncle had been using her body since she was a little girl at the Academy. Nobody wanted to hear anything like that, of course. They were not willing to admit that it was even possible. They said she was lying because she wanted to avoid punishment. It was this flat-out denial, this refusal of even the slightest doubt, that convinced the Hokage of their corruption. Not that Tsunade could do anything about it – it was a clan matter entirely, and that was exactly where the Hokage's jurisdiction stopped.

But regardless, Tenten was done with her family – all of them. Apparently she'd always known that they wouldn't help her against her enemy. And maybe for that reason she'd assumed that she could depend on no one but herself. As soon as she knew she was strong enough to fight her uncle, she'd stood up to him and threatened to expose him to his wife and his father. And it was shortly after that that he went after her on the training field, tried to corner her, because he thought it was necessary to remind her of her place. His mistake was in underestimating her strength. And her anger. She wasn't a little girl anymore who could be fooled into thinking that men, especially clan heirs, were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Nobody knew the truth, of course, except for her teammates, the Hokage, and a select few members of her clan. Gai-sensei had been red with rage when the Hokage explained to him that the matter of Tenten's accusations fell to her family to address, and they would hold their own inquiry. Everybody involved knew that the clan would do nothing of the sort. They knew that the clan would bury this story hard and well, and no one outside one very inner circle would be the wiser, and Tenten's uncle would inherit as soon as his father died, and life would go on. Neji knew about the situation and Gai-sensei's anger because he'd watched everything unfold from beginning to end. He wasn't specifically allowed to use his Byakugan to spy on his own countrymen, but he had to know what was going on. He suddenly had to know everything he could.

Tenten came away from that incident no worse for wear. She didn't seem to be bothered at all by the fact that her clan had disowned her, and felt fully justified in the physical damage that she had done to her uncle. She left her immediate family behind her without a second glance. Her father was not a man who thought much of women. Her mother, two years dead, had been her father's second wife. The first wife had had sons, now grown men with whom Tenten had only a nodding acquaintance, and her father was on his third wife already, a woman barely more than a teenager. Tenten didn't have a real connection to any one of them, beyond blood, and that meant little to her. Team Gai was her family, as far as she was concerned. So she lived in the village barracks for a few weeks, and then in a boarding house, and finally her own apartment, when she'd saved up enough money for the security deposit and some furniture. And by this time, by all appearances, she'd gotten over whatever there was to get over. She smiled and laughed like she always did, untouched by any malaise as far as Neji could tell. And six months after the fight with her uncle, she made chunin.


	2. Chapter 2

2

* * *

><p>"Maybe we should sit down to kiss," he said after a minute of not kissing.<p>

They'd stared at each other for a while, and while Neji was waiting for her to make the first move, she was clearly getting aggravated with him for not making the first move. This became even more obvious when she said, "All right, but only if you kiss me first."

"This is your idea – you should be the one to start it." He was ashamed to realize that, if anything went terribly wrong, which he knew tended to happen when teammates did this kind of thing, he didn't want to have to blame himself. He wanted this all on her head.

Of course, it didn't help that she'd decided they needed to be in the bedroom right off the bat. ("This way, it won't be as intimidating when we finally have sex," she'd reasoned.)

She sat down on the edge of her bed, a narrow, hard-spring mattress, and he sat down next to her, but a comfortable arm's-length away. She was dressed in a simple tee-shirt and pajama pants, almost certainly the same clothing she always wore to bed. The clothing was pale blue and nonthreatening. She was sitting closer to the head of the bed, and presently she reached over to the bed stand, opened a drawer, and pulled out a coin. "Heads – you kiss me; tails – I kiss you. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

She flipped the coin and it landed, on the bedspread, tails-up.

He watched her from his periphery. She sighed once, deeply, through her nose. "There's no helping it," she said in a tone of deep resignation.

Then she crossed her arms across her midsection and sat there for a minute, staring blankly at the wall. He wondered if she'd changed her mind, and mentally he prepared himself to leave her apartment as quickly and politely as he could and pretend that this had never happened.

"Take off your forehead protector," she said, still staring at the wall.

"Why?"

"Just do it, Neji," she said whinily.

He let her hear the tiniest of sighs from his mouth while he undid the band in the back, and he made a point of getting up off the bed and walking over to her desk, which was littered with kunai and shuriken, and clearing a spot for it. Then he walked back over and sat on the edge of the bed again.

By the time he sat down, she was already undoing her second bun. The sight of her hair in a state of release made him uneasy. "Why are you doing that?"

"Because a thing like this should be done properly."

He was pretty sure that this was not how first kisses were done properly, at least according to the girls that had passed through his life. He didn't like it – her hair down like that. It was still kinked from her typical hairdo and shiny with sweat, since she obviously hadn't showered since training. It made her look different, unfamiliar.

She turned to face him, and he took it as a signal to turn and face her, one leg now fully on the bed, half-lotus. She mirrored his posture to a T. "Well, get on with it," he said.

"Shh. I'm strategizing."

"What is there to strategize?"

"Don't break my concentration."

She started to lean toward him, then pulled back abruptly. "Close your eyes!" she demanded.

"Why?"

"Because you're making me feel self-conscious."

He sighed again, a little more obviously, and complied. He didn't like being bossed around. But he couldn't help thinking that the faster he cooperated, the sooner he'd be out of here.

She got around to it eventually, after a long and awkward silence. With his eyes closed, he felt and heard her weight shift on the mattress as she leaned toward him, and then he felt the vague warmth of a living body not far from the skin of his face. Then her lips pressed against his. Fireworks failed to go off. Horizons failed to unfold. Miracles failed to be realized. She held it for a few moments, then backed away sharply.

He opened his eyes. "Is that all for today?"

"Fine."

* * *

><p>The next time they met in her apartment, the coin showed heads.<p>

"Don't say anything," he said. It was a command, not a plea. She nodded.

They were on the edge of the bed again, and she'd once again taken her hair down, although she allowed him to keep on his forehead protector. Or at least she didn't object to him leaving it on. He was thankful, because it made him feel a little less guilty, for some reason. Maybe because it let him see this more clearly as training.

When he leaned in, he did so quickly – too quickly. He missed, and kissed her nose. He heard and felt her scoff, and her lips clearly formed a smile. Great, she was going to laugh at him. He tried again and got the patch of skin between her nose and mouth, then moved that one down her to her mouth, finally. The lips and skin pressed, and he felt her inhale through her nose against his face, and once again fireworks failed to occur.

He broke it, but didn't pull back entirely. In the spirit of experimentation, he kissed again, and slowly opened his mouth, encapsulating hers and a little bit of her face as well.

She pulled back with a cringe of disgust and quickly wiped the back of her sleeve across her face, not looking at him. "Is that wrong?" he asked her.

"How should I know? Ugh. Try it again."

He did, but it didn't improve. She backed off again. "I don't like it. You get your spit all over my face. Why would you do that, anyway?"

"I saw a couple doing it in a park. That is how it is sometimes done." In truth he'd studied them shamelessly with the Byakugan, desperate for a clue.

"Well, it's dumb. I don't like it."

"So do you want me to keep my mouth closed?"

"Well, no, I guess not," she said, to his surprise. "Maybe it just needs work."

"Hn."

"Again."

This time he didn't open his mouth as much, and she opened hers very slightly, so there was more overlap. When he realized he was feeling the inside of her lips, it unsettled him slightly, but not enough to make him stop. It was interesting, in a way. It was a side of another person he'd never experienced. Who sat and wondered about the sensation of the inside of someone else's lip? It was just something that had never occurred to him before.

He ended up with some of her saliva on his face, and when they broke, they both used the backs of their sleeves. "Why do people like this so much? It's so weird," she ruminated.

"It does not make any sense," he agreed.

"Sex I can understand, but this is beyond me. I mean, you _need _sex, biologically. But where does this fit in?"

"Humans are unusual animals in many ways."

Still, they kissed again, this time meeting in the middle. It was gross when he realized he'd gotten some of her saliva in his mouth, but he didn't pull away.

* * *

><p>The next time, they let their tongues into the mix, and while both agreed that this was strange and unsettling, it didn't stop them from doing it again. Neji found the top of the cavity of her mouth, with its defined spine, to be even odder than the inside of her lip. They eventually learned that a certain, careful amount of suction – not too much – would prevent saliva overload. Along with angling of the faces to allow the matching of contours, this was a great breakthrough.<p>

And when they kissed, their arms on the bed sometimes touched by accident, bumping into each other while they leaned, and their legs touched unabashedly, but these things were always done unconsciously. A day came when she reached her hand behind his neck and tentatively pulled him toward her to force his mouth open wider, and he felt that this was a signal that he should be doing the same, so he cupped his hand around the back of her neck. He'd never touched this part of a person's body before, except to knock them unconscious, and he touched the pads of his fingers against the bottom of her hairline with mild interest.

The time after that, she declared unequivocally, "We will use both hands." The statement did not brook argument; it was made in the same tone and manner that she had declared, earlier that day on the training field, "Today I am only using only the kana." He agreed that it was the next logical step, although he realized with increasing discomfort that the activity of kissing would become much more involved.

They kissed, but she broke and clung to the front of his shirt when his hand, leaving the back of her neck, trailed down her spine, and she shuddered slightly. He saw it as a sign of progress, although whether good or bad he didn't dare guess.

Slowly, over the last several days, he had begun to feel the stirrings he was supposed to feel, which were nothing like fireworks, but more like the definite and inevitable draw of one magnet to another. It was a kind of heat he wasn't entirely unfamiliar with, having long experience with all elements of his own body, but it was something he was used to controlling with painstaking care, and he was just now beginning to realize that control was something he'd have to give up in order for this to work. It was a strange realization, very uncomfortable, but freeing.

Today was no different, and in all honesty the prospect of increased contact had become appealing to him. The reasons were twofold. Firstly, it would hopefully detract from the amount of time spent kissing, which still made him vastly uncomfortable, and secondly, he had decided that the idea of further contact was a good one.

He broke position and pulled her body into him, and she seemed to conform to his shape as if she were water poured into a glass. She brought her legs up on either side of him and he leaned over her, pushing her down into the bed, the position filling him with almost uncomfortable excitement. And then, like a daytime nightmare from when he was thirteen and his body seemed out of touch with his brain and his iron grip on self-control was at its most vulnerable, the organ between his legs started filling with blood. And the Unreasonable Thing, as he had often thought of it with disgust, started pushing against the front of his pants, suddenly hopeful. As if this act that had been dreamed of (and practiced, alone) for so many years were finally going to actually happen. Which, he realized, it was. He was so used to denying and subsuming any urges of this type that it took him a few moments to process.

He overcame his hesitation and he found his hands cupping either side of her waist, pushing up her shirt, the palms connecting, at last, with real skin, which was soft and smooth and lovely. He dragged the skin of his palms against her, up her ribs, his heart pounding with anticipation. Until suddenly she stopped him. With her hands on his wrists, pushing him back.

"Bad?" he asked, second-guessing.

"No, it's okay, just give me a second."

She drew two deep breaths and finally nodded her consent, and he kissed her again, his hands on the small of her back, pulling her into his arch. But as soon as his hands started to travel up he felt her shudder deeply, and he stopped again. Her pulse was racing, and when he opened his eyes he saw tears in hers. "It's okay, it's okay," she reassured him falsely, "Just… hang on. I'm fine. I just need a minute."

And then, out of nowhere, his belly filled with ice, and his hopeful member began to recede.

"We should stop," he said, the words falling out of his mouth like lead. And he knew he was right, because all his new desire had just been killed dead. He did not want to do anything to her right now. He sat up on the bed, shifting his weight to his heels.

"No, it's fine. I'm fine," she said, sounding more confident, even though he could clearly see her eyes overflowing now, the tears running in channels down her face. "Just pretend we never stopped, okay?" She sat up a little and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him back down on top of her. She was forceful and he did fall, but he braced himself with arms on either side of her, fists balled up against the mattress and nails digging into his palms. She looked strange to him with tears on her face. He'd never seen her cry.

She breathed slowly again, clearly trying to collect herself, but the tears ebbed out on their own. She was the picture of misery, and he didn't feel so great himself. He had absolutely no idea what he should do.

Years ago, before he came into himself, he would have scoffed at her weakness and walked away in disgust. But she wasn't just some inferior face at the Academy anymore. She honestly was his friend, maybe his only one. This was the kind of delicate situation that he'd never noticed before, but now that he had the ability to understand, or at least try – now it was different.

"Well? Touch me."

"I… can't," he told her. His words sounded soft and unfamiliar, like they were coming from the mouth of a stranger.

She turned her face away, tears coursing down. "Then just leave."

He sat up again slowly while she covered her face with her hands. Then he slid off the bed and walked away, not too quickly, but unyielding in his steps, until he was in the hallway outside the door of her small apartment. He closed the door behind him in a civilian way, so she could hear it, but he didn't walk down the hallway toward the stairs. He stopped where he was, in front of the door, staring at it, not knowing, at all, what to do. He was helpless and inadequate and lost. Completely lost.

He breathed deeply. And what he did next would have seemed strange to anyone. He sat down on the floor of the hallway, up against the wall opposite her door, folded his legs half-lotus, rested his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes. He tried to meditate.

After a while, he activated his eyes and found her sitting on the floor herself – she was next to her bed, up against the wall, with her knees tucked up to her face and the heels of her palms buried in her eyes sockets, bawling. It was an ugly sight. Her face was red and swollen, and tears and snot ran down to her chin in unrelenting streams. Jagged, hiccupping sobs wracked her body.

He felt two things at once: guilt, that he was seeing her in a moment of weakness that she so definitely would not want him to see, and a complete inability to move from the spot or look away.

Not long after, she grabbed a scroll from a shelf near her bed and embedded every one of her shuriken into the wall across from her bed, still crying, but maintaining her perfect aim. The shuriken ended up in neat rows, each one perfectly vertical and a half inch apart, each one with one tine fully embedded in the wall, one partially embedded, and the others free, and each row of shuriken was exactly one inch above the last. Neji was now quite good at using his eye techniques to judge tiny distances. She had hundreds of shuriken. And then she left her bedroom and moved into the kitchenette, where she took first teacups, then plates out of the cupboard and hurled them against the far wall, where each one shattered.

When she was out of breakable dishes, Neji stood up and knocked on the door softly. He didn't say her name, but he was watching when she stopped, considered, and turned away, pretending she hadn't heard him. The look of shock on her face was genuine.

He knocked again.

"Fuck off, Neji," she said sharply.

Pretending he hadn't read the words on her lips or heard her hoarse voice through the door, he knocked again.

She didn't answer the knock, but she heaved several deep breaths and started to collect herself. He watched her go to the kitchen sink and turn on the tap, and then she splashed water all over her face, so much that it ran down the front of her shirt. Then she used a dish rag to towel off. Then she dug a broom and dustpan out of the closet and went to clean up her dishes, which took some time. Then pulled each shuriken out of the bedroom wall, brushed the plaster off of it, and sealed it again in her scroll. Then curled up on the bed, on top of the covers. Neji kept watch until she was asleep.

* * *

><p>The next night they were both free, he didn't go to her house after dinner, and she didn't ask him to. They trained separately for a week, then he had a mission with Hinata that lasted a week, and then Team Gai had a mission. A crime syndicate had organized a factory workers' rebellion in one of the farther-off port cities, and they were called in to quell it. It was heavy combat, and it rained unrelenting, cold rain the whole damn time. The wind heaved against them in uneven gusts that were hard to predict, but Tenten still made her mark with every shot. They didn't kill any of the workers, but the crime syndicate also had hired shinobi in the mix, and in this case they often didn't have a choice – half the time it was clearly kill-or-be-killed. So they did their job, and they did it cleanly, although they themselves did not remain clean. By the end of it no one had clothing that wasn't either soggy or mud-splattered and permanently stained. Gai-sensei's green jumpsuit was green no longer; Lee was barely recognizable.<p>

It wasn't anything special. The enemy shinobi were not the strongest. Gai-sensei even had to chastise Lee for drawing out a fight longer than he had to. It wasn't that Lee was cruel, only that he took every opportunity to improve himself, even if it meant leading an enemy on longer than necessary. Gai-sensei actually yelled at him for it, pointing out that if he tortured an opponent without cause (and was there ever really a just cause, Lee?) then he was no better than the lowest of low shinobi, who assumed themselves to be a different race, and looked on all others with disdain, only seeing them as tools – shinobi like Orochimaru. Lee took this lecture to heart, as he did with all sensei's other lectures, and was truly in the throes of agony for the remainder of the mission. He re-declared his dedication to the village, to his shinobi and civilian brethren alike, and vowed to put himself through no end of agonizing physical tasks to prove his true humiliation…

Neji and Tenten quietly avoided him, especially when he started demanding beatings from them. Neji had started to wonder about Lee and his desire for physical pain, but as soon as his thoughts turned down that path he quickly and forcibly made himself think of something else, because there were some things one should never know about one's male teammates.

But the fact that they were both avoiding Lee meant that Neji and Tenten were hanging around each other again, and eventually, near the end of the mission, they ended up falling back into their old routine of sparring in the late afternoon. With the routine reasserted, and eye contact once again possible, their friendship also fell back into place again. With each one ignoring that they'd ever had physical contact outside of combat training.

The stalemate lasted until the night of their return. They gave their report to the Hokage, Gai-sensei not omitting any detail of combat; they received her praise and commendation, and then the team disbanded. Lee had requested time for personal training and had been granted it, and he soon disappeared into the hills, undoubtedly bound for serious self-inflicted muscle strain. Gai-sensei gave them one last thumbs-up, and disappeared to whatever life Gai-sensei led away from their team – something Neji still wasn't sure of. He knew the man lived alone and trained a lot, and that was about it. This left Neji and Tenten alone on the threshold of the Hokage's tower, together.

Tenten smiled at him. "See you, I guess." And she walked away. Her smile was still what it always was, he realized: unbeguiling, genuine, untouched by worry. No matter what. It was constant, not unlike her aim.

First he started back to the Hyuuga compound, but after a minute he stopped, turned around, and flew over the rooftops to intercept her before she got home. She looked stunned when he landed in front of her. "I can come over tonight, if you want," he said, his face carefully schooled into an emotionless mask.

She hesitated a moment, her face unreadable even to Neji, and then gave her assent.

* * *

><p>The first thing he noticed upon stepping into her bedroom that night was that she was certainly less… dressed than usual. She was still wearing her usual night shirt, but underneath it there was a noticeable lack of supportive garments.<p>

It wasn't long after he came to this realization that she calmly removed the night shirt entirely, which left her naked from the waist up, and tossed it to the other side of the room (and he had a flashback of her throwing shuriken, embedding them in the wall in a neat line – the gouges were still there). "It'll be easier this way," she said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself more than explain the action to him.

Neji, almost against his own will, brought his hand to his head and ran fingers through his hair in distress. And then self-consciously he brought his hand back to his side and tried to regain his composure. His palms actually felt clammy. The odd thing was, it wasn't especially arousing to see his teammate topless. Unlike looking at a picture in a magazine one of his male cousins smuggled to him, this situation was incredibly intimidating. He couldn't actually look straight at them, because it made him too uncomfortable. Once again, the side of him that was used to extreme self-control was perplexed.

"Would you just get over here already?" Tenten asked, sounding peeved.

"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked, stalling.

"I'm fine. Get your ass _over_ here, please."

Now she was angry. Probably because he'd brought up the last time, even though he'd done so obliquely. It was reasonable to ask if she was all right. He never wanted to see her in tears again, and moreover he didn't want it to be his fault.

"Have you ever considered… asking anyone else to do this?" he asked, approaching the bed.

"It's crossed my mind, believe me," she said as he sat down. "It's just… it's a matter of trust."

He studied her face briefly; he believed that she was sincere. "I can understand that," he said.

"It was either you or Lee."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, okay, don't give me that look, I'm just saying, if you had said _no, _I wouldn't have given up."

"Hn," he said.

"So are you going to touch them or what?"

"I am considering my plan of attack."

"Strategizing, huh?"

"Don't distract me."

"Hmph," she said, her lips curling into an amused grin.

As with most tasks, once he had started, he found it was really not so hard. And the Unreasonable Thing, completely unaware of the precipice of emotional distress Neji was sure they were about to step over, was quite enthusiastic. Insistent, even.

Tenten, however, didn't seem to be impressed. "Ouch."

"What?"

"When you pinch like that, it hurts."

"It's not sexy?"

"No. When something hurts, it is not sexy at all."

She was sitting fully on the bed, cross-legged, with her back against the headboard, while he knelt in front of her, trying to keep his weight balanced on his knees while his hands were stretched out in front of him. It was a position completely unlike something one might see illustrated in a dirty magazine, and rather more like the most awkward attempt at groping ever made.

"I thought the pinching was supposed to be arousing."

"What, did you read that in a book or something?" she asked.

"Something like that," he said, thinking of his cousin's magazine.

"Well then, I think you need to stop trying these things that you read in books or see on the street," she said calmly. "I don't think they work on me."

"I can see that they do not," Neji agreed. But silently, he wondered. Were there actual books on the subject? Perhaps he could find something helpful. The Hyuuga main house had quite an extensive library; maybe…

"What do you feel?" she asked suddenly, interrupting his rumination.

"What do you mean?"

"When you feel it, what does it feel like? Here?" And she calmly leaned forward, unintentionally pushing her breasts further into his grip, so that the flesh pressed out between his fingers, and she reached out with one hand and cupped the bulge at the front of his pants.

He closed his eyes and bit back an expletive. Then let go of her chest. One hand shot out to the mattress so he could steady himself, and the other grabbed her hand and pushed it away firmly. When he opened his eyes he saw her looking at him with confusion, and he realized that she had asked him a question.

"It feels like burning, but in a good way," he said. For Neji, not particularly skilled with words, this pitiful explanation was as close as he could get.

"What, like a rash?"

"No, deeper, from the inside."

"Oh," she said. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, I told you, it's… good."

"Well, either way – I'm glad."

"Glad?"

"I was wondering if maybe you were gay."

His open look of horror was enough to set off laughter, a gentle sound that bubbled up from her (still naked) chest. "Oh come on, Neji, there are worse things."

"There are not," he said without thinking. "It isn't that I don't want to touch you. It is only that I do not want to hurt you."

He was hoping she would understand and not be offended, although having both things seemed impossible. It did kill her giggles quite effectively. "You hurt me all the time, Neji," she said. "I've got the scars to prove it. It's no big deal."

"This is different."

"No it isn't," she said, full of the confidence he was used to seeing in her. "It's just training, remember? I'll be fine. If you hurt me, I'll get up again - I'll get over it."

He didn't know what to say. He couldn't tell her that he was afraid of making her cry again, because that would undoubtedly offend her. So he said nothing.

"Neji – can I touch you?" she asked suddenly, with a blush.

Of course he immediately assumed that she was talking about one specific part of him and readily agreed, without even stopping to consider, but instead of reaching for it again she pulled his shirt up over his head and tossed it aside. His skin jumped when her hands touched his chest, but not because the feeling was pleasant – her hands were freezing. He broke out in goose bumps. Her hands mirrored each other. When her fingers brushed his nipples, it felt odd, but not exactly good. Not at all bad, but not exactly good.

"I wonder why men even have them," she murmured, moving her right thumb in a circle around his left nipple and staring at it as if expecting it to answer.

A thought struck him. It was not the kind of thing he would consider, or rather, it should not have been. But this bedroom had become a place to let out thoughts that he ordinarily would shut out of his conscious mind.

He thought of the way he'd learned his forms as a child, with one of the Hyuuga elders standing at the front of the dojo, instructing the class through careful demonstration, while the students tried to keep up, mimicking his moves.

He reached out and rolled his own right thumb over the closest nipple. He was interested by her sharp intake of breath. "What are you doing?" she asked sharply.

"Whatever you do to me, I will do to you."

When she pushed in on his, he reciprocated on hers. When she rolled his between her fingers, he did the same.

It ended as awkwardly as it ever did, with Tenten flatly declaring, "That's enough," and quickly pulling a blanket over herself, and Neji hurrying out the door. But he'd seen the pink blooms on her cheek, and it made him more reluctant to leave than before, in part because he sensed progress.

* * *

><p>The next time they started out with the shirts on, but worked them off while kissing.<p>

The time after that, there was a lot of tongue.

The time after that, there was also a lot of tongue, namely, his tongue on her chest, and he decided that he was no longer intimidated. She was making sounds that he'd never imagined from her, funny chirps low in her throat when her eyes were closed, and he could hear (being in such close proximity) the way her heart sped up after certain touches.

And every time now when he left her apartment (sometimes when she'd reached her limit, sometimes when he'd reached his), he left with a problem - or rather, condition. A condition that was making his life increasingly difficult.

This was how he gained such intimate familiarity with the bathroom off the common room on the ground floor of Tenten's apartment building. With his loose clothing, and the fact that he was usually able to make it all the way down the stairs and through the common room without running into anyone, it not only a viable solution but a convenient one. Most importantly, it did not involve taking care of the problem in Tenten's apartment. But it also had the advantage of eliminating the problem before he went home. In the house of Hyuuga, you never really knew where people were looking, or how closely.

It was a quick walk from her door to the stairwell, then a brief, hurried trip down the stairwell (usually a simple leap) to the ground floor, and then he would open the door to the common room as coolly as possible, on the off chance that someone was actually sitting on one of the spotless couches or reading one of the books from the bookshelves that were clearly just there for decoration. It was sometimes very late at night when he came down, and the place would be dead but for the whirring of the fluorescent lights. One time there was a pair of shinobi drinking takeout tea and talking in soft voices, once an old man balancing his checkbook. If people were there, they sometimes looked up at him, even acknowledged him, and he acknowledged them back politely – a nod out of common courtesy – while being very, very grateful for the fact that his traditional Hyuuga clothing was conveniently loose. Then he would discreetly duck into the low-profile doorway of the men's room.

Meeting only the bare minimum for such a place, the men's room had one urinal, one stall, and a sink with a mirror. Like the rest of her apartment building, it was clean but spare, dingy in a way - a place that people only saw out of necessity and that no one cared to apply aesthetics to. Many late nights he found himself sitting on that toilet and staring up at the ceiling tiles, wondering why they'd gone with that style of tile in that exact shade of beige – was that just what was available when they were building it, or was it an intentional choice? Then there were the myriad messages left by, apparently, at least two generations of ninja, scrawled into the stall's door. Probably with a kunai in most cases. Although the door must have been painted over many times, the gouges clearly allowed many messages to shine through. Hieko was here. Kunoichi cost more. Your mother sucked Goro. Sakura has crabs. (The last too outdated to be referring to the Sakura of his and Tenten's acquaintance – presumably.)

This particular period in Tenten's experiment did not actually last very long, but to Neji it felt like it did. In addition to the less-than-romantic atmosphere of the men's room, the fact that he was committing a sex act – _this _sex act, which was perhaps less forgivable than if he'd had a consenting partner – in a public place left him feeling extremely low. He'd use his Byakugan before leaving to make sure that there was no one in the common room to see him when he left – or at least no one who'd been there before he went in. And then, of course, there was the small but mortifying threat of discovery. Neji wasn't positive that it was written in the Hyuuga code anywhere, but he felt that, if anyone found him out, he'd be honor-bound to kill himself. That would at least be preferable to trying to live it down.

Once, while he was in there, someone came in to use the urinal, and he was frozen on the spot, unable to even let go of his member because he was afraid of giving himself and his activity away to the listener, who was likely to be a shinobi. He was forced to sit in a rictus of private passion while the stranger urinated, flushed, and left without washing his hands, and he did not relax for a full ten seconds after the stranger had left.

And then came the night of the drunk.

Tenten's apartment building was a pretty quiet place overall – almost all who lived there were single shinobi, the type who tended to be away from their homes for long periods of time, and who rarely did much more than sleep or eat when they were home. But there's always an exception.

He looked like he was in his twenties, was blonde, wore typical chunin gear, and was clearly plastered past all reason. Neji didn't have enough experience with alcohol to guess what he'd been drinking by the smell, but whatever it was, there was a lot of it. His face, which was probably as pale as Neji's under normal circumstances, had bloomed bright red, including his retinas, and when he waved at Neji after the latter entered the common room from the stairwell, the gesture almost made him lose his balance. There was a drawn-out word that might have been some kind of greeting, an attempt at the name _Hyuuga, _and then he leaned against the bathroom door and essentially fell inside.

Neji did not know what to do immediately after the bathroom door closed, but after a few moments of internal debate decided to sit down on one of the couches, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him, so as to make his shirt billow out over his lap as much as possible. He heard quite clearly when the drunk began a spirited rendition of a popular song, and after a few minutes he realized with horror that the man was slowly making his way through all the verses.

With enough time, Neji was sure that either one of two things was bound to happen: the drunk would leave, or Neji's problem would ebb away on its own. Unfortunately, several minutes passed with no change in either situation, except that the drunk trailed off in the middle of his song and instead of finishing it, started another.

It should have been easy, sitting there in public and listening to a very unattractive man sing badly, for his condition to abate, but it did not. He blamed Tenten. Things had been getting very different, lately, when he came over. She was more curious. And what started with tentative touches inevitably led to their bodies pressed up against each other, moving with grave intent. So far they'd kept their pants on. However, she'd been putting her hand down his, to explore him.

Two nights before the drunk was the first time it had happened. They'd been lying next to each other on the bed, he on his back, her on her side, and her free hand had wandered across his chest and past his waistline, in a move that split the difference between seductive and juvenile. She reached down and touched carefully, the pads of her fingers snaking through his pubic hair, then tracing around the base of his cock, then carefully prodding the fleshy sacs of his balls. Then she'd trailed them up his cock, staring at the bulge in his pants with deep curiosity.

She'd done this twice now, and both times he'd borne it as long as he could, then carefully removed her hand and left.

He'd made a decision not to try to reciprocate until she specifically asked him to, but it was hard when he was rubbing his hand against her, even if her pants were still on. The clinical play-by-play that had become her habit had somehow turned into what could only be called dirty talk, albeit very cautious dirty talk. "Ooh… it kind of tickles when you do that, but then when you go like _that _I can feel it in my… and I really like it when your hand presses…"

He grit his teeth. He was still sitting on the couch, and in spite of the extremely unsexy situation, his condition had maintained its full fervor. But with a start, he suddenly realized that the singing had stopped. Had the drunk gotten away while he was distracted? Neji decided to, once again, do something rather unethical with his Byakugan. He activated his eyes and looked into the men's bathroom. There, draped across the only toilet and with his pants down, the drunk was snoring away. Neji quickly deactivated his eyes and groaned.

Well, he decided, there was the stairwell. There was absolutely no way he was going back to the Hyuuga grounds in this condition, or even stepping out of doors if he could help it, so he'd just have to settle for the stairwell. He'd be quick and quiet about it. He immediately vowed never to let it come to this again.

No sooner had he started, however, then he heard a door open and close on one of the floors above, and froze. He'd never run into anyone in the stairwell before. What had happened to his luck tonight?

It was a shinobi, no less. And one, like him, who was not taking the stairs. He got his hand out of his pants just in time before she landed on the bottom floor.

It was Tenten.

They stared at each other in shock for a moment.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, then realized how foolish this question was, seeing that she lived in the building.

"I was going to get a soda from the vending machine. What are _you_doing here?"

"I… uh."

She raised her eyebrows at his silence.

"Can I use your bathroom?" he asked finally.

Finally, her eyes fell to the bulge at the front of his pants, which he had forgotten to try to hide in his distraction. Neji cursed himself. During a mission he'd never let his guard down. When he was training he'd never let his guard down. But now?

"You don't really need to use the bathroom, do you?" she asked, knowingly.

"I will only be a few minutes," he said, his face burning.

She looked at him funnily, then shrugged. "Door's unlocked," she said.

He waited for her to walk out of the stairwell and into the common room before he moved, and even then he had to take a second to collect himself. Could he do this in spite of the fact that she _knew_what he was doing? But then he looked down at his still unrelenting erection and decided that he didn't have much of a choice.

A few minutes later found him sitting on her toilet. And just as he was about to get down to business, the bathroom door opened. Tenten again.

"I want to see you do it," she said.

"What? Why?"

"I just do. I'm curious."

So she stayed. She stood with the door behind her and her arms crossed firmly on her chest, regarding him as she would an unusual alien weapon. And she watched. And after that he didn't worry about slinking off to a public bathroom anymore.

* * *

><p>Ever since Team Gai existed, they had trained hard together, especially when missions were few and far between. When they went more than a week without a mission, things tended to get grisly. Gai would think of even more bizarre and painful exercises. Lee's passionate speeches would get louder and longer. Tenten's fuse tended to run short at times like this, and Neji bore it all with increasing violence. Usually Lee suffered the brunt of his wrath.<p>

Gai actually recognized when his students needed a break, but was unable to see that what they really needed was time apart. So instead of setting them free for a day, he took them all out to lunch.

To Neji's chagrin, he found that it actually was not a bad idea. Tenten was smiling and laughing at Lee instead of trying to kill him, and he even found himself saying more than three words together, while Lee was forced to wax silent every so often in order to stuff his face with food. Lee seemed to view the "all-you-can-eat buffet" concept as if it were yet another physical challenge.

The restaurant had tables on the street due to the balmy, mild weather, and the team sat at a small table a few feet from the occasional passersby. Gai and Tenten were facing out to the street and Neji and Lee facing toward the restaurant. Therefore it was the former two that first noticed Tenten's uncle passing.

Neji knew that something was suddenly wrong from the way Tenten suddenly dug into her food with as much vigor as Lee, and from the sudden change in his sensei's attitude. Neji's senses were on alert right away, although he didn't let his posture reflect this in the slightest. Lee, meanwhile, was so enraptured by his food that he didn't seem to notice a thing. Neji bent his head forward slightly to give himself a curtain of hair and activated his eyes, and that was when he saw the man. He did not seem to notice his niece; he really was simply walking by on the street, conversing with some other ninja, possibly another adult from her erstwhile clan.

Neji noticed Tenten's obvious attempt to ignore the situation, and so he decided to do so as well. But what really caught his attention, and stirred his alarm, was Gai-sensei.

Most shinobi, especially jonin, were sensitive enough to chakra that they could pick up on strong emotions, like love and rage, due to the change in pattern of the chakra waves emitted by the human in question. The pattern commonly known as "killer intent" was the easiest to sense, and thus the one that was most often picked up on. That was the main reason ninja were encouraged to bury their emotions.

What stunned Neji was that Gai was _not _hiding his emotions at the time, and it did not seem that he was doing this purposefully – it seemed to Neji, as unlikely as it was, that Gai had simply forgotten himself due to the strength of his emotion, and as a result the killer intent rolled off him in waves. Neji's attention was heightened. While other shinobi on the street and in the restaurant noticed and started to look markedly curious, Tenten's uncle was genuinely oblivious. Neji directed his attention back to his sensei. Gai was also oblivious, lost in a world of his own emotion. His face was dull and passionless except for his eyes, which stayed trained on the man in question with acute intensity.

Presently Neji watched as the man's companion placed a cautionary hand on his shoulder and whispered something. They paused for a moment before quickly hurrying away. Neji, privately, chose to imagine his gait as a scurry, a retreat.

"Time for more food," Tenten declared without much enthusiasm, immediately after cleaning her plate, and rose quickly and returned to the buffet. Lee, inspired by this apparent attempt at competition, finished his own plate in a few bites and moved to follow her.

Neji watched her uncle round the corner onto the adjoining street, and then quietly deactivated his eyes. In that moment Gai also seemed to have an epiphany of self-consciousness, and when Neji blinked to his normal vision he suddenly felt the lack of killer intent. And instead of staring at the man on the street, Gai's eyes were lost in the glass of water grasped in his fist, and he was silent.

And then Lee and Tenten were back at the table, Gai was smiling again, and lunch moved on almost as if nothing had happened. There was a frisson of anxiety behind Tenten's smiles, and Gai's relaxed posture seemed forcibly so, but other than that it was business as usual.

* * *

><p>"All right. Get naked," she said, undoing the drawstring of her pajama pants.<p>

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me, and you know exactly what I mean. We're doing this."

"Are you sure?" he asked, immediately wanting to smack himself. Surely there was a more tactful way to ask that question?

"No, but there's no point in dragging this out forever. If you don't want to do it, just leave right now and we'll never talk about it again, okay?" She had been throwing that offer out with increasing frequency. He was neither surprised by it nor inclined to consider it.

He obediently loosened his belt and dropped his pants on her bedroom floor, quickly picking them up again and draping them over a conveniently-positioned bo staff so they wouldn't get wrinkled. When he looked back at her, she was already naked on the bed and taking her hair down.

The light wasn't soft or golden; there were no candles. There was no music, low or otherwise. He took his shirt off and hung it neatly over his pants, and he tied his hair back to keep it out of the way. She pushed her blankets and sheet down to the foot of the bed. It was too warm in the room, but he didn't complain. He wanted to ask again and again if she was sure, but instead he didn't say anything, and neither did she.

In fact this would have been a good time for conversation, any conversation, but there was none. There was just his awkward shuffling knee-walk across the bed to position himself on top of her, his Unreasonable Thing (already at full attention, seemingly more in tune with the situation than he was) bobbing in the air like an unsteady top, her flinch as he accidentally brought his weight down on her knee, and the shy way she wrapped her legs around him, nervously pulling him toward her with her heels. There was the anxiety in her eyes, along with a hundred other things, probably, that he couldn't read, because the better he got at understanding other people, the less he could tell from just their eyes. He had to reach down and help the head of his penis into her, because it wasn't like a door catch slipping into place as he'd been led to believe, but rather more like trying to plant a stake in the ground. It felt unnatural and had to be forced.

"It's okay," she said, and he was all too aware of the deep irony of the fact that she was trying to comfort him, and he felt embarrassed for himself. Suddenly he wished he were the kind of man that women were supposed to want, knowing and self-assured – which he was, in other places, but not this bedroom. He wished he were the man in an action-adventure movie, one who clearly knew what he was doing in this situation, knew how to be in control. He wished he could lift her up and make her stop worrying, or, more importantly, stop thinking at all. Even when he was entering her for the first time she didn't stop analyzing every aspect of the action, and he knew that was what she was doing even if she didn't tell him so out loud this time.

It felt good inside her, so deeply _good, _and it shocked him out of his nerves for a second – but then he was brought back to the present, looking down at her, and realizing with a start that she didn't look any different than before. And that he didn't feel any different, except that he felt good. There was no grand revelation. They were just body parts and nerve endings after all.

He moved very slowly, with painstaking care. "What does it feel like?" she asked him.

"Good," he answered, because it was the most fitting word, and perhaps the only one worth using. "What does it feel like for you?"

Her eyes went unfocused for a second while she analyzed her sensations and chose her response, and he took the opportunity to notice the way her head was forced to rock slightly into her pillow every time he pushed into her. "It hurts more than I thought it would."

"It hurts?" he asked, suddenly withdrawing.

She dug her heels into his butt and pulled him right back into place. "Not like that, not like it's the first time. Just, when you… you know, when you hit the top, I can feel it pressing and it's uncomfortable." She put her hand on her belly, presumably to show where, exactly, the "top" was.

"It's not all bad," she said, quickly backpedaling, and he realized this was a response to the look on his face. "Don't worry about it, it's fine. It doesn't even hurt now like it did at first, and even then it was only a little."

"Maybe I should stop," he suggested.

"No, don't. I like…" - He caught his breath and knew instantly what he wanted to hear, but when she finished her thought after a few more thrusts he was disappointed. "I like that I can make you feel good."

After another minute she said, "Shouldn't you go faster?"

"Do you want me to go faster?"

"No, I just thought… when you're whacking off you usually go faster than this."

Caught completely off guard for once in his life, he had to stop and rest on his elbows and laugh. Neji was rarely relaxed enough to laugh. That also felt good.

"Oh shut up," she said. But he could hear her smiling. "It was a logical conclusion."

"Of course."

"Will you get going again already?"

He obliged, and after a few moments he started to regain some serious intentions. He was a little startled when she reached up to his face. She brushed a strand of hair behind his ear – it must have come loose somehow. "Your sweaty hair was in my face."

"Sorry."

He lowered himself to his elbows again, because he wanted to try it out, feel her skin against him. It took a few seconds of maneuvering to get the position right. He liked the way their chests pressed against each other, and even more the way they moved against each other, the friction. At first he felt a little revulsion at the amount of sweat, but the revulsion went away. She let her hands slowly crawl onto his back, not grasping but resting there.

They didn't say anything to each other for a while, and he closed his eyes and paid attention to his body. He could feel himself starting to get close, but then he opened his eyes and looked down into hers, and she was crying.

Not a lot, and not heavily like the last time, but it was undeniable. Her eyes were closed too, and the tears were leaking out of the corners, flowing vertically down into the pillow. He pulled out immediately.

"Why did you – oh," she said, opening her eyes and quickly swiping the wet trails away. But they were there again a moment later. "It's okay, you don't have to stop," she said.

He didn't answer her. He almost wanted to ask what was wrong, but of course he knew.

"Come on, Neji, it's okay. It'll go away in a minute."

For a moment he wanted to. He wanted to take her at her word and go back to work, because he really had been getting close, but then, suddenly, it was unfathomable. And his desire ebbed away. More importantly, he wanted it to. He didn't want to feel any kind of sexual need when she was vulnerable like this, and by that simple fact of his not wanting it, it went away.

"Don't leave," she said, with more silent crying. "Please, let's just… it's okay. It's okay."

And with sudden insight he realized that she wasn't repeating those words for _his _benefit.

He sat up and reached across the bed to her nightstand, where there was a tissue box, and brought it to her. She didn't protest any more – she just sat up and grabbed a few and hurriedly tried to erase her tears. She blew her nose. She used a few tissues to soak up the tears and then tossed them to the floor beside the bed, grabbing more tissues almost immediately. Both of them were still naked and were sitting up.

Unsure of himself more than ever, Neji did something that their sensei often did: he placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him, startled, and then did something new. She leaned forward and reached her arms around him and pulled his body into her own. The embrace was not even remotely sexual. He found that it did stir feelings deep within him, but they were old memories of when he was a child and hurt, and his caretaker would wrap her arms around him and tell him to be brave.

It was obvious that neither one of them had done this kind of thing as adults (or almost-adults), and the embrace was awkward, but at the same time it felt natural, like an old memory, like something he'd missed for years. His arms wrapped behind her back – in his life he'd never hugged anyone smaller than himself – and hers halfway around his sides, as if she were afraid to confine him too much.

Not much else happened that night. They hugged for a while without saying anything, she cried, and then she noted that it was getting late, and he agreed, and they went silent again. Eventually he got up to go to the bathroom (to actually go to the bathroom), and when he came back she'd pulled the sheet up and was lying under it, curled up on her side. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do, but he eventually decided to crawl under the sheet and lie beside her. He stayed far enough on his own side that they didn't accidentally touch, so it was comfortable enough.

* * *

><p>The next morning he awoke early. Tenten was still asleep. She had a clock on her nightstand, which was on his side of the bed. Unsure of himself and feeling slightly lazy, he watched the slow change of numbers for a few minutes, finding himself unable to concentrate on any single thought for too long. Mostly he thought of images from the previous night, and his feelings were mixed on the subject. Some of it had been exciting, but mostly he knew it would be a sad memory.<p>

But then he remembered that he had promised to train with Hanabi and one of her teammates this morning – they would be expecting him around eight. If he left now, he'd have plenty of time to shower and meditate.

He slid out of the bed and hurried over to where he'd hung his clothing the night before, stepping softly to avoid waking her. Just as he was fastening his pants, he heard the sheets slide against each other, and when he turned around she was sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with one hand – the other holding the sheet to her chest.

He was afraid for a moment that she would ask why he was leaving, although he was ready to give his reasoning and felt that it was perfectly justifiable. But instead she said, "Well, I'm glad that's over with."

"What do you mean?" he asked as he tied his hair.

"I mean, mission accomplished. We had sex. It's over with."

"…Of course," he said. He felt surprised, but he wasn't sure why, and he left the room without trying to analyze himself any further.

* * *

><p>Just as she had promised, it didn't affect them professionally. Nothing changed in their training schedule. As far as he knew at the time, neither Gai nor Lee noticed anything different. His clan didn't, either – after all, he'd only really been missing one night, and that was hardly unusual for an active ninja.<p>

Life went on, and soon enough the whole ordeal became a memory. It was hard to be around her, at first, and not think about her naked, but his professional nature won in the end, and the naked thoughts were left only for those hours he was alone at home. Which was how it should be.

She went on as usual, seeming unaffected, with the occasional bright smile on her face.

Sometimes he wondered if she had intended something different with the whole experiment, but Tenten had never lied to him before, as far back as he could remember. She'd hidden things from a lot of people. But she hadn't lied, exactly. It was just that no one had thought to ask the right questions.

They ended up spending an uncommon amount of time together for a few months, because Lee was dead set on becoming a chunin and was training with two other genin for the next exam, and Gai-sensei was at his side. Tsunade accepted the arrangement and sent Neji and Tenten on more missions together than ever. Usually there were a few other people with them – other odd chunin who'd been promoted before the rest of their teams. Neji and Tenten worked together so seamlessly that they often made the interlopers look bad in comparison.

Once, they'd been given just one other teammate – Reina. She was about a year older and acted much wiser. She had sly black eyes and deep black hair, and it had to be admitted that she was very attractive. Tenten caught him off guard by saying, "You should go for it."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. She's been flirting with you for the last week straight."

Neji was perplexed. "Has she?"

"Yes! You don't actually think you're that interesting to listen to, do you?"

He considered this. Then he reflected on the fact that it was so hard to tell, with girls, whether they were just making friendly conversation or had other motives.

Seen in this light, Reina still remained attractive. Not only was she pretty, but she was also relatively well-known. He was sure that she served in ANBU on at least a part-time basis – he knew he'd seen that black hair flying behind a mask before. She didn't belong to a major clan, but her family was relatively well-off. If he did decide to pursue her seriously, she might even be acceptable to his family.

She was nice, and rather entertaining – talking much more than he and Tenten did by themselves. But she knew how to work in quiet stealth also. He found that he respected her, even admired her. And she was obviously interested in him. "Neji – _go __for __it,__" _Tenten said. "You'd be stupid not to."

"It might be a bad idea," Neji said, reflecting on his very different personality.

"Well, you'll never know if you don't try, you chicken."

He wasn't sure how to take Tenten's coaxing. Certainly they were not emotionally attached to each other in that way, but considering the turns their friendship had taken, it did put him in an awkward position. Yet Tenten continued to ignore this, forcibly pushing him toward the other girl whenever possible.

And he wondered, almost against his will, if Tenten wasn't overcompensating. If trying to push him toward someone else wasn't a kind of denial of her own feelings.

Complex emotions were still beyond his abilities to read. Complex emotions were things he could hardly allow himself to feel.

Reina was sweet to him, but approachable like no girl had been before. The mission lasted about two weeks, and in that time she'd made it obvious even to him that she was very much interested. A few days after the mission was over, he ran into her on the training grounds, far from the eyes of the public – an ideal place to ask anything he might want to ask. Or suggest.

She was so damned perfect – unmarred skin (being a genjutsu specialist), aquiline nose, perfect poise, hair _so_black. The more he noticed her, the more he realized that it would take an idiot not to recognize her beauty. And he _was _genuinely attracted to her – it was hard not to be. And now that he knew what it felt like to have sex, he could picture doing so with her, and it was a very nice picture.

It was the perfect moment to strike, but he didn't. Instead, she made the first move. "Maybe you'd like some help with your genjutsu," Reina suggested.

"I doubt it would be useful for me," Neji replied.

"Maybe there are other ways we could help each other."

She'd never been so blatant before, and it immediately caught his attention. She grinned in her sly way. "Or maybe you could just take me out to dinner. I'm not a complicated girl, Neji."

And therein lay the main appeal, he realized. She didn't want undying love, she wanted fun, with a bit of affection. She wouldn't shy away from him. They were perfect for each other, and she would make it as painless as possible. It wouldn't be a struggle.

And, knowing who he automatically compared her to, he decided he would never go through with it. "I'm sorry if you got the wrong impression of me," he said.

He made a few even less believable comments, trying, in his clumsy way, to let her down gently. She shrugged it off without seeming to be very bothered, and she left.

He was left alone on the training field, wondering what was wrong with his libido. _Knowing _what was wrong with his libido.

Hating himself the whole time, he walked home. Part of the problem, he knew, was human desire. To be spiritually whole, one had to let go of desire. Desire was the root of corruption. Corruption rotted the soul.

He thought about it for a long time that night – and eventually his reasoning looped back on itself, creating contradictions. But if he'd learned anything about his own humanity, he knew that it existed – that he wasn't just a pawn to be played by the Hokage, or his uncle, or his hormones. He had a self, defined by a past and unique thoughts. And he was happy with it. He was almost content with his life as it stood, with the parts he knew he could depend on. Although, in a lot of ways, he was still growing as a human.

He gave up on analysis and decided.


	3. Chapter 3

3

* * *

><p>The Hyuuga library was deep and diverse. It was in a pair of relatively small adjoining rooms on the second floor of the southeast building. One room had a large picture window facing out into the courtyard and a small table with a few chairs in the middle, and the other had all walls covered with shelving, and more free-standing bookcases in the center. The thick, musty smell of old paper always permeated the place – the window was never, ever opened – and there were continual, omnipresent motes of dust suspended in the air. Neji supposed they were there in every room, but in the library they were just more noticeable. When you breathed in, you could feel them on your tongue. But it was worth it when you needed to look up information that you couldn't just ask about. The two rooms were packed with shelves of obscure books and scrolls on every subject from local agriculture to the founding of Konoha to the invention of the least important jutsu.<p>

On certain subjects, though, he found, it failed utterly.

And he was much too embarrassed about what he was looking for to point this out to anyone. The closest he could get were the medical texts, and they fell short by quite a bit. He found a few novels that looked promising, but they were severely lacking in helpful detail. Once or twice he thought about looking elsewhere, maybe a bookstore or Konoha's library – but the very thought of seeking out this kind of information _in __public _was enough to make him cringe with humiliation. It was bad enough he had to do it where any member of his clan might just wander in.

They should really cover this at the Academy, he found himself thinking. The subject is so much more useful than flower arrangement.

He gravitated toward the medical texts. When the Hyuuga elder that kept the library asked him what he was researching, Neji smoothly made up an excuse that sounded reasonable – something about helping a colleague with a medical jutsu. Neji couldn't even remember exactly what he'd said afterward, since at the time he was concentrating so hard on not letting his face flush.

It wasn't really worth the bother. He stole into the library a couple nights in a row, spending several hours there, but in the end he had nothing to show for it. He waited a week, distracted by two other short missions, and then tried again for one more night. He left with an overwhelming wealth of information on the internal mechanics of the female reproductive system, but what good did that do him?

It had been a week since he'd thoroughly given up on his search when he was summoned to see his uncle. It didn't even occur to him, when he received the summons, that it might be for any reason out of the ordinary. He assumed it was just a clan mission or something similar.

"Neji."

"Hiashi-sama," Neji said smoothly, bowing to the man.

Meetings with Hiashi followed a strict pattern, Neji had found. There would be basic questions about his well-being, then a discussion of his training and perhaps recent missions, and then the man would get to the point.

"I trust you are doing well," the man said.

"I am, uncle. And yourself?"

"I am well, thank you. You have received many solo missions lately, I notice."

"Not so many, and those that I have been offered are low-rank and brief. The Hokage has specifically stated that she is keeping me in the village until the summit in two weeks."

"Ah. I am sure you will do your clan honor in whatever service she has selected you for," Hiashi said.

Neji thanked him and waited. This would be where Hiashi told him what he was needed for. But his uncle was… hesitating?

"And your sensei, has he recovered from his injury?" Hiashi said.

"Yes. He is fully recovered. He attributes this to his excellent health and ardent consumption of carrots." On a mission not long ago, with Lee and Tenten at his side, a powerful flash bomb had been ignited close to Gai-sensei's face, leaving him temporarily blind. It was an unnecessary injury, but Gai still had an inclination to protect his students before all other considerations, even if they were good enough to hold their own. Lee had wept inconsolably. Even Tenten had been deeply affected. She'd visited him every day while he was in the hospital, and drilled herself harder than usual in training – something she tended to do whenever she was feeling guilty. Although she rolled her eyes at him on a regular basis, Tenten respected and loved her sensei. In a very real way, he was more of a father to her than her own.

"That is good. I have a strong respect for your sensei, who is truly the most accomplished master of taijutsu alive today."

"I agree," Neji said.

Silence fell again. Now Neji was certain his uncle was hesitating, and it was starting to make him anxious. "Is there a reason you called for me, uncle?" he asked.

"Yes," Hiashi said, then paused again for a moment before he continued, leaving Neji's nerves on edge. "I am concerned about Hanabi. She has been overtraining. I do not want to discourage her, but if she continues in this vein she will injure herself."

Neji knew that his uncle had a difficult time talking to women, any women, even women in his own family, and especially his daughters. It would have been nice if his wife was still alive to communicate for him, but she'd died on a mission years ago, and it had never occurred to the man to even consider re-marrying. "I will speak to her," Neji said. "Or perhaps I could allow her to train with my teammate Lee for a week. I doubt her enthusiasm would survive unchanged."

"I do not think torture is a necessary step just yet – but it may not be a bad idea to make her aware of the threat."

"Then I will speak with her."

"That is very well. Thank you, nephew."

Again, silence.

"Is that all, uncle?"

He hesitated again before answering. "Yes."

Neji bowed and started to get up.

"No," his uncle said suddenly. "There is something else I called you for."

Neji sat back down obediently, now thoroughly uneasy.

"It has been brought to my attention that you have a girlfriend," Hiashi said.

Neji immediately blushed to the roots of his hair. Discomfort overwhelmed him and he found it impossible to say anything.

"I have been told that you are quite close, as she is your teammate."

Now he was mortified. His uncle _knew __who __she __was._

And who, exactly, was telling his uncle these things? Were there _spies? _What had they seen?

"And this is a matter which must be discussed. These things must be said plainly, early on, to avoid disaster."

Jarred out of his internal monologue, Neji was startled. "What?"

"How much do you trust this girl?"

He heaved a breath. He couldn't _not_answer his uncle – that would be a blatant sign of disrespect. "I..." He cleared his throat. "I trust her with my life."

"That is well. Do you use protection?"

Neji nearly gagged. "I… uh. Yes. She… uh. As most kunoichi do. She has. She takes… um."

"And that is why I asked you if you trusted her," his uncle said quickly. "Because it is of utmost importance that you have confidence in the protection. If she becomes pregnant, you have to marry her. Our bloodline cannot be allowed to stray beyond our control. There have been women… in the past… who have used this to their advantage. If they want to belong to a powerful clan, they simply seduce."

"She is nothing of the kind," Neji said quickly. How could he possibly correct his uncle's assumption that this was a romantic relationship? That would mean explaining the whole thing, which was far out of the question. So Neji had to let the misunderstanding remain.

"Even so, I would recommend using a condom," his uncle said. "Strongly recommend, unless you are willing to marry this girl."

"I understand," Neji said quickly, wanting nothing more than for this conversation to be over.

"Good," Hiashi said. Then paused again. "Neji… that is, nephew, do you have any interest in marrying this girl?"

"Uncle. Um. We have not discussed it."

"You are very young still. But I need to know if I can consider you for other matches that might be for the clan's benefit. Such opportunities often come up, you understand."

"I have no interest in being married or engaged or committed to anyone right now," Neji said quickly and firmly.

"Yes, that is well, you are very young, as I said. I will not commit you to any agreements of that nature. Please let me know if your intentions change."

"I will."

"Good."

Silence.

"May I be excused, uncle?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. Good luck to you."

"Thank you." Good luck? Good luck for _what?_ "Good night, uncle."

"Good night."

Neji walked back to his room as fast as he could walk without getting noticed. Then he sat down on his futon, folded his legs into half-lotus, sat with his head in his hands, and halfheartedly hoped for his own imminent death.

How had his uncle found out? You never knew where the Hyuuga were looking. There must have been spies. And if there were spies, they surely knew everything.

Everything except the nature of his relationship with Tenten, apparently. The nature of his relationship with Tenten was not romantic – it was platonic, with sex. Awkward, horrible sex. Which she was done with. Which he was planning on convincing her to start again.

Life would be so much _easier_if he could just walk away right now, if he could have told his uncle that they had broken up, that they were just teammates again. And then he could direct his energies back to training, or maybe even to girls like Reina, who were surely much less complicated. With whom he would have to use a condom.

He didn't sleep much that night. He left for hardcore training early the next morning and returned to his bedroom after dinner and a shower to find a gift on his bed.

It wasn't wrapped. It was a book.

It was a manual.

Well, not so much a manual… more of an encyclopedia…

Mostly it consisted of positions. Positions illustrated in such a way that there could be no mistaking the mechanics. But it did have a few handy tips, also. It seemed to be badly translated from whatever original language it was in… the language of a much happier people, surely. But he understood it. After he deciphered it. Which took a lot of time.

He tried, tried, tried to ignore the fact that this was most likely his uncle's gift, but it turned out to be a difficult fact to ignore.

* * *

><p>"Neji! That's obscene," she whispered automatically, quite chagrined, turning her head away from him with a distinct blush. In the center of the training field, Gai-sensei was demonstrating a complex meditation method that was almost certainly made up by Gai-sensei himself fifteen minutes ago.<p>

"It is not."

"Students! Listen to the hum of the universe around you as its energies penetrate your unconscious being!"

"Yes, sensei!" Lee chimed.

"I don't know what's gotten into you, but I don't like it," Tenten hissed, with unusual bite.

"It's simple. I did you a favor, and now I expect the same in return," he said evenly.

"I don't think it's quite the same!" she argued, under her breath.

"The ethereal light of eternity permeates my body!"

"Sensei!" Lee gushed.

"That's for you to decide, of course. If you don't want to, I understand. But this is a new discipline for me, and I mean to perfect it."

"I get the feeling that this is all a big joke to you," she snapped.

"It is nothing of the sort," he replied.

"I can feel the energies of the chakra of all living beings flowing through me!"

"Sensei!"

"Why don't you just ask someone else? Anyone else? I'm sure Reina would be more than happy to assist you. Seriously, Neji. Find yourself a girlfriend. A real one."

"I don't want to," Neji answered.

"Observe the unearthly peace that surrounds me!"

"Sensei!"

"So I'm just the safest one, is that it?"

"Yes. The most trustworthy. This is simple experimentation, you see. You understand that."

"Oh yes, I understand."

"At peace with the universe, the body can achieve a state near nirvana!"

"_Sensei!_"

"So are you agreeing, or not?" he asked.

"…Fine. My place, though."

"Fine."

"Sensei, I can feel the unearthly nirvana in my _hair_!"

* * *

><p>She was blushing profusely. "This is ridiculous," she stated.<p>

"Perhaps."

She was naked on her back, on the bed, and he was bracing himself over her, with arms stuck onto the mattress on either side of her hips. It was almost an hour since he had arrived. (She had insisted on showering extensively.)

"You can't possibly be this cool about it. You have to be hiding something."

"Perhaps."

"Stop saying that!"

He smirked.

Her discomfort was obvious and amusing, and she was well aware of both of these facts. "You just get off on dominance, that's what this is about," she accused.

"Perhaps."

"Oh my god. Are you kidding me?"

He kissed her right below the belly-button and looked up to see her reaction. She was still staring at him with deep suspicion, propped up on her elbows. "This… this can't be healthy," she said.

"Who said it was?"

"I'm just _saying. _It's not hygienic."

"Neither is manslaughter, or your average lunch."

She scoffed. "You're being disgusting."

He kissed lower.

"It's very unusual," she said. "For you to be disgusting."

He kissed lower. He felt the crinkle of her curls against his lips and felt her thighs jerk under his hands in reaction to the kiss. She seemed more startled than anything.

"I am having serious second thoughts about this," she said, her voice higher-pitched than normal.

"You should stop trying to analyze it."

"You know me well enough to understand that that's impossible."

He would be the first to admit that what followed was gross. The idea was gross and the act was gross, and there was no other or better word for it. She was right. This was disgusting. And probably pointless. She remained propped up on her elbows, staring at him with deep suspicion, and her expression didn't change from the first time he looked up to the next.

"You need to relax," he said.

"Sorry, but that's absolutely impossible right now."

He sat up. "Do you need a minute?"

"No. I'm fine. Except that this is a waste of time. A really gross waste of time. And I don't understand why you're so interested in it. It's not natural."

"It is so natural. Lots of couples do it."

"They do not."

"They do. It's perfectly normal."

"What makes you such an expert? Have you been reading things again? I'll bet that's it." She grabbed onto the sheet and pulled it over her. "You need to learn that things you read about just don't apply to me, Neji. I'm never going to be normal."

"No one is normal. Especially not in this village."

"I don't care. I've changed my mind. I'm not doing this," she said, sounding quite petulant and looking incredibly uncomfortable as she pinned the sheet tight to her chest with white-knuckled hands.

He sighed, realizing that there was no place for reason in this argument. "Fine."

And for a little while he honestly believed that was the end of it.

* * *

><p>Except, a few weeks later, she showed up to practice, looked at him, and blushed.<p>

Which was very strange. They'd practiced together just the week before with absolutely no such incident. He'd been assigned to assist with a clan matter for several days but was now back with the team. He'd been greeted by a bombastic speech from Gai, Lee imploring him to hit him as hard as he could in the chest, and Tenten blushing and looking away.

He'd seen her blush a few times before, by now, just never in this context. Which was to say, never _without _context.

Even though their team training went by as it usually did (although, with Gai's propensity for coming up with new tortuous exercises for them to endure, nothing their team ever did together could really be described as _usual_), he found himself utterly distracted. Because every time their eyes met, she did it again. She'd managed to get herself under control to the point where it was probably not noticeable to anyone else, especially with her face red from exertion anyway, but he remembered that first blush with extreme clarity, and he was unsettled.

"What is it?" he asked her, keeping his voice low and even, when they stopped for a water break.

There was a moment of comprehension in her eyes, and then she blinked it away. "What? What are you talking about?"

"You know what I mean. What is different?"

"I _don__'__t _know what you mean," she said, blatantly lying.

"Tenten…"

She walked off without another word, making a show of stretching out her arms, as if she needed to avoid him to do that.

"What is going on?"

Neji started when he heard the voice. Sometimes, when he was deep in the thrall of Gai-sensei, it was easy to forget that Lee was also a thinking human being.

"Tenten is acting strange and will not tell me why," he said, seeing no reason to lie to his teammate, or to be any more specific than that.

Lee, it had to be said, was not exactly an intuitive person. But he was a ninja. And, although his personality often overshadowed it, he was actually a good one. And even though Neji knew this perfectly well, it still surprised him whenever Lee picked up on something subtle.

"Ah. You know, Gai-sensei has said to me that a woman's heart is as complex as it is deep."

Neji realized that he had somehow put himself in the same position Tenten was in a few minutes ago. "Lee, please. I do not know what you mean. Tenten and I do not have that kind of relationship."

"Neji. I work with you both almost daily. There are things that are impossible not to notice."

"What things?" Neji asked, honestly perplexed.

"Don't worry. Gai-sensei does not know yet – I am sure of it."

"Lee, _what __things?_" he repeated. Trying to get Lee to focus on something could often be difficult.

"I think it is for the best. You are both so well suited for one another!"

He clapped a hand on Neji's back and smiled broadly, forcibly ignoring the rest of Neji's pleas for information.

And Tenten still wouldn't meet his gaze.

A few hours later, they broke ranks for the day and she vanished into the forest before he could even move in her direction. Well, she had made one thing perfectly clear, at least – she didn't want to see him. At all. She hadn't minded seeing him on their mission last week. What on earth had changed?

* * *

><p>A few weeks passed, and everything normalized again. They worked together as they always had – sometimes with Lee and Gai, sometimes alone. Personal matters aside, there were missions to plot and a village to protect. The reality of being a ninja was that you had a personal life at the discretion of the Hokage, or not at all. And for Neji, it had always been more complicated than that, since he also had the Hyuuga telling him what to do.<p>

But even if normalcy had a different meaning for a ninja, it was still normalcy. It was the routine that you expected, that could set you at ease or bore you, depending on your attitude. When there was no mission, they met for regular team training on a set schedule that had been established for years. Lee and Gai had an additional training schedule on top of that – this was a leftover from Team Gai's early years, when Gai had had to push so hard to improve Lee as fast as possible, so that his taijutsu was so far ahead of his peers that they wouldn't question his presence in the ranks, even if he had no control over his chakra. Partly because of this, because they both felt wrong to stop for the day when their teammates kept going, Neji and Tenten had a separate schedule too, just for sparring together. Whenever anyone was absent because of non-Team missions, the rest combined forces, or worked alone.

Now that they were older, of course, there were added complications. The Hyuuga required more and more of Neji, from private missions to the training of the younger generation, so more often than not Tenten was left training on her own, or (if she were driven to it) running wild marathons with the green beasts. But then she'd started taking coaching from an elite ANBU member on swordsmanship, and not long after that recruited her own student in weapons training. Lee and Gai, meanwhile, had started their own dojo, a place for the worship of pure taijutsu.

Sometimes it felt like Team Gai was falling apart, with so many different projects and missions pulling them in so many different directions. This wasn't unexpected – it happened to a lot of teams, after all – and at some point Neji was sure that their usefulness as Team Gai would be eclipsed by everything else – Tenten had already said she would consider joining ANBU after she made jonin, and Lee and Gai could easily make a profession out of teaching exclusive taijutsu at their dojo. Team Gai would cease to be, sooner or later. Even if they remained more or less friends, and even if Gai continued to be uncomfortably paternal (the affection he had for his students could be smothering), it was bound to happen.

Neji hated the thought. It was one of the reasons he was so reluctant to let Tenten drift away from him like she seemed to want to. If their friendship could end, the team could easily fall apart. Maybe Tenten sensed it too, and maybe that was why she let him near her again.

The two finished sparring one day and decided to get food, stopping at their favorite noodle stand in the village – beloved not so much for its product as its location. It marked what was more or less the midpoint between the Hyuuga complex, Tenten's apartment, and the village entrance, although it wasn't especially close to any of them. It was there, while they were eating dinner, that she asked, out of the blue, "Do you want to come over tonight?"

Neji kept eating without the barest hint of a reaction. He had learned that this was the best way to deal with anything approaching the topic they were approaching – pretend it was normal, something that fit in their routine. They were seated next to each other at the counter, which was a good place to be, since although they were physically close enough to talk without being overheard, there was no obligation to look each other in the eye. Instead, Neji alternated between staring at his bowl of noodles and looking up over the counter at the cook, a stout man with an apron thoroughly dyed with broth splatter.

"Okay," he said.

After dinner, they walked there together. If she thought there was anything strange about the fact that he wasn't trying to sneak in, she didn't show it. Neji didn't feel that there was a need anymore. His uncle and his clan clearly knew, and Lee knew, and he supposed Gai probably knew as well, even if their sensei hadn't said anything. He couldn't imagine that the Hokage didn't know, either. So there really was no reason to sneak around.

She poured a few glasses of water, and he could tell that she was nervous, but he didn't say anything about it. Always before he'd gotten into trouble that way. So they sat next to each other on her cheap couch and talked about benign things, like missions. It was no exaggeration to say that the discussion of killing other people was less explosive than the discussion of sex. Because when you were killing for your village, it was never exactly a choice. Your village needed it, or the Hokage had ordered you to, or it was important to the mission. The other thing was a result of people acting purely on their own.

He never could recall the exact moment when he made up his mind to do so, but he did eventually kiss her, and she didn't shove him away, so that was good. Even though he had hated this action at first, it now felt familiar and comfortable, something he wanted to do. He could almost understand why it had become a normal thing that humans did in the process of courtship. Without the added weight of foreplay, it was just a kiss, a simple sign of affection, something that felt nice. His arms were around her soon, and the feeling was something between familiar and new, comforting and exciting, because he remembered the feeling of her body from not long ago, but he didn't think he would ever touch her that way again, until now. So he treated every moment like a gift, because as soon as she decided to push him away it would be all over, again.

But she didn't push him away – and if she had even shown the slightest hint of hesitation, he would have stopped immediately, but she didn't. He even paused at one point, straddling her as she lay across the couch (one of his knees very close to slipping off the cushion) and said, "Tenten, should we stop?"

But she silently shook her head and pulled him back down. He was the one hesitating this time, waiting for that other shoe to drop, and in the end she had to take off his pants for him. By that time they had somehow transposed positions (the memory was very foggy afterward, and he couldn't recall how this had happened, exactly), and he was laying down on the couch looking up at her when she positioned herself – but they found that this position was not really as simple as fiction made it seem, and he had to reach between their bodies and hold his member steady while she lowered herself down on it. After that it was easy, though.

They built a rhythm, and he tried to keep his eyes open so that he could watch her. She still had her bra on (the clasp at the back was being difficult, and he had given up on it, and she didn't seem to mind), and her eyes were closed with concentration, her mouth open out of necessity.

He wasn't able to hold out for very long – although it was still longer than he would have made it if he had been on top, he felt. He tried to warn her – "Tenten, I'm going to…" but he trailed off, jerked into her sharply, and failed to keep his eyes open as he let out a guttural grunt. When he did open his eyes again, he saw that she was looking down at him with a vague smile, almost tenderly.

He closed his eyes and waited until he could breathe normally again. When he opened them, he looked at her and a question occurred to him – one that he did not know exactly how to ask. "Did you…" he started.

"Did I what?" she responded. Then she realized what he meant. "Oh," she said.

"Did you?"

"No."

She knew better than to try to lie to him.

He reached up and wiped a drop of sweat off of her chin before it fell onto his bare chest. "Do you want me to…" Again he let the sentence trail off, hoping she would figure it out before he had to say it.

She did. "What? No! Ew, when you've just been down there? That's _really _gross."

"It is not," he argued, not knowing why he was arguing, as he absolutely did not _want _to do that right now.

"Not… not before I take a shower," she hedged.

"Want me to come with you?"

"Neji," she chastised, laughing briefly. But she let him.

* * *

><p>Showering with her was not nearly as sexy as his imagination wanted it to be. It was all business. But she did at least let him wash her hair, closing her eyes and leaning back while he rubbed his fingers against her scalp and worked up a lather. She had the water spraying against her chest, completely blocking it from him, and as a result he was feeling a little cold, but he didn't complain. "What changed?" he asked her, fiddling around with a snarl in her hair – one that was likely his fault.<p>

"I… um." He watched her face, transfixed. Even with her skin pink from the shower, his keen eyes could see that she was blushing.

"You… what?"

"Well," she said, shaking off her hesitation and dipping her head into the spray to rinse her hair, "I tried it. Couple times, actually, to be honest."

He didn't understand at first. "Tried what? What do you mean?"

"Don't make me say it, Neji."

"You have to explain better."

She scoffed. "Do I have to spell it out for you?"

"I cannot read your mind."

"I… you know. With myself."

Now she was blushing very thoroughly, and he understood why. "With yourself?"

"Well, _you _do it every day, apparently, so I don't see how there's anything for _me _to be ashamed of!"

"I didn't say there was."

"So it doesn't gross you out? Do you think I'm a freak of a girl?"

"No. I think it is something that everyone does and no one discusses."

He watched her closely while she fanned out her hair with her hands to get it completely rinsed, turning to face him so that her hair would be directly in the water stream, and as she tipped her head back he realized that this was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

* * *

><p>They kept moving along in that manner, and for the first time it became something nice, something he looked forward to rather than an obligation to a friend with occasional and purely physical highs. It became the new normal, the new routine – the new training, whenever they were both in the village. And it was comfortable, even though they still ran into the inevitable awkwardness now and then, and she occasionally yelled at him and tried to send him home out of embarrassment. These days, he took more convincing before he'd leave.<p>

He ended up sleeping at her apartment often. He tried to avoid it at first, because even though he was resigned to the fact that everyone knew, he didn't want to make it that blatant. But most days, it was just easier to fall asleep with her. And it felt good to wake up next to her – he normally woke up first. When they were on missions together and he saw her sleeping, it did not particularly interest him, but when he woke up and watched her sleep in her own bed, it was different. He didn't try to explain it to himself just yet, but he liked to be near her, and not just for sex. He just let the moments pass, one by one, and savored them.

It was easy enough to go without explanation while they were still experimenting, because they could leave it unsaid that the experimentation was the reason. The more comfortable they were with each other, the more at ease _she _was, the better everything… went. He would always distinctly remember the first time she came while he was inside her. He was sitting on one of her kitchen chairs while she rode him slowly, and all of a sudden her breath hitched, she stilled, and he felt the indescribable sensation of constriction inside her, and the rhythm of her heartbeat reverberated through him. She'd come before then in his presence, in the course of other experiments, but never with him inside.

She still cried, sometimes, and sometimes still he'd feel her shudder in a way that was not pleasant at all. And sometimes, too, she'd turn her body away from him and curl up and cover her ears. She couldn't help it. He hated how she blamed herself for these reactions, and how the shame she felt over them always made it worse. So when she told him to leave, he didn't. Even when she yelled at him, he'd stay. Either on the bed or on the floor or on the couch. He'd made up his mind that he wasn't going to leave her again. And it was always funny when she woke up in the morning and was completely unprepared to see him lying on her living room rug.

Kiba and Naruto once asked him (because who else would) how to get a girl, since apparently they didn't know anyone else in their cohort who had done it, and he realized how absolutely ridiculous it was for him to try and offer advice. He told them so.

"Don't hold out on us, man. You've _been __there,_" Kiba protested. Naruto had his eyes squinted and his forehead scrunched, as he did whenever he was contemplating something utterly beyond him. "Can't you offer some words of wisdom?"

"Why don't you ask the Toad Sennin?" he asked, looking at Naruto. "I can't believe he hasn't given you instruction on this already."

"Ero-sennin only has one way of getting girls: he pays for them," Naruto said. "But _you__'__ve _slept with a _real _one."

"You think there's some magic combination of words that will get the girl of your dreams to sleep with you?" he asked Naruto.

"Yeah!"

"No, idiot," Kiba said to Naruto, "That's not what we're asking. What we're asking is just for a frickin _hint,_okay? And don't think it doesn't kill us to admit that you cangive us advice on this."

"I can't help you," he said, for what felt like the thousandth time.

"Why the hell not?"

"Because it's not going to happen for you the way it did for me. I wouldn't have the first idea how to act with any other girl."

This was true. He'd never even been on a date with her, and he doubted that there were two other people exactly like them in the world.

"So tell us how you got into _her_pants, and we'll leave you alone," Kiba said.

Neji looked him squarely in the eye and told him to fuck off.

* * *

><p>He developed a chemical dependence of sorts. He hated the nights when he was in the village and she was away. When he was on a mission without her, it was fine, because he had the distraction of the mission. Even when they were out as a team, it was fine, because even while she was trying to avoid him (for obvious reasons) it was something just to see her. But when she was away and he was home, in his own bed, he could tell something was missing.<p>

She'd been away on a mission for a week, and he'd been thoroughly annoyed by it, when he left a clan meeting to meet Lee and Gai-sensei on their training field. But when he arrived they were nowhere to be found – there was just Tenten there, stretching under a tree. Thoroughly stretching. He stared at her and admitted to himself, for the first time, that he was addicted.

"You're back," he said as he approached.

"You're late for team training," she said, with a shade of a grin, as she reached her arms over her outstretched right leg and wrapped her fingers around her toes.

"Where are Gai-sensei and Lee?" he asked, every step bringing him closer.

"Climbing something," she said off-handedly.

"Climbing something far away?"

"Why do you ask?"

By now he was right next to her, and he felt no need for pretense. She let go of her toes and looked up at him and he reached for her hand and pulled her to her feet. His hands fell comfortably around her, sliding into the small of her back. "Let's," he said just before he kissed her.

He broke the kiss and buried his face in her neck and felt her laugh. "Here?" she said.

"Yes."

She pulled back immediately. "Are you _mad_?"

"We are perfectly safe. Who else uses this training field?"

She folded her arms on her chest and her eyes bored into him. "Are you, Hyuuga Neji, seriously suggesting sex in a public place?"

He almost thought about it for a moment, then decided against thought. "Yes."

She glared at him warily. "You had just better keep your eyes on."

"I will."

And that was how it came to be that the two of them found themselves rolling in the dirt below the tree where she'd punctured too many targets to count over their long history as shinobi-in-training.

Although he was enthusiastic about the scenario, she only very reluctantly allowed him to start removing her clothing. It turned out to be a lucky call.

Because although he kept his eyes activated… one unfortunate thing about Byakugan is that, while the technique offers 359-degree vision, its usefulness is limited by the ability of the user to concentrate on 359 degrees. And Neji's concentration was focused wholly on Tenten. So it was really very fortunate that Tenten had only let him undo her shirt by the time their sensei's voice bellowed out Neji's name at the top of his lungs.

* * *

><p>Three things became immediately clear to Neji.<p>

First, that he had been wrong in his assumption, and Gai-sensei truly had no idea about what was going on between Neji and Tenten, at least up until now.

Second, that Gai had a lot of issues with what had happened to Tenten, resulting in a lot of rage that had had nowhere to go for several years (since it wasn't exactly permissible to kill a fellow shinobi of your village, no matter how much you hated him).

Third, that it seemed Gai had finally found a suitable outlet for that rage.

Neji managed to dodge for several minutes, which in itself was a major victory – Gai-sensei was one of the physically fastest shinobi that had ever _lived. _Gentle fist was no advantage when you couldn't keep up with the position of your enemy's body – half the time when Neji tried to reach for his sensei's chakra points, there was nothing but air by the time his hand made it to the right place. Neji didn't even try to block Gai's attacks at first – hoping that, perhaps, his sensei was only trying to scare him. When the first hit landed on Neji's chin, an uppercut so hard he could feel two back teeth crack and he was completely consumed by the pain for several seconds, he realized that Gai-sensei was not fighting as if this were a spar.

Gai-sensei was intending to fight to the death.

And while Neji had superior skill in his blood, he didn't have the experience – there was a reason that, although they were both jonin by this point, Neji still considered this odd man his teacher, his superior. Regardless, Neji definitely did not have the inclination to fight back quite as viciously.

Caught off-guard for a second time, a roundhouse kick landed on his face and knocked him flat on the ground, and he was only just conscious enough to dodge the falling heel that followed less than a moment later. In desperation, and only able to see out of one eye, Neji retreated to the canopy.

Gai followed.

Neji thought he heard Tenten yelling something, but he only caught snatches of it. She was begging her sensei to _stop, __please __wait, __you __don__'__t __understand, __we __can __explain, __it__'__s __okay, __it__'__s __not __like __that, __please _stop.

He was flat-out running away, now, and he was sure he'd hear about that later, but frankly he'd not done this badly in a fight in several years. Unfortunately with the second branch he landed on, he realized his ankle was sprained, and he had to think quickly because if he hesitated even a fraction of a second…

He reached up and swung himself onto the limb above it with his arms. A split-second later he heard a violent _crack_as the limb he'd been standing on fell away from the tree, and that was when he realized that Gai had opened gates.

How many? No time to wonder…

Gai lashed out again with his fist, this time against the trunk of the tree, and Neji had to flee again to another tree. The one he'd been standing on wobbled unsteadily for a few moments before crashing down onto the forest floor, but by that time the two ninja were already moving, were too far away to see it kick up the dusty leafmould as it landed. Gai's fiery eyes reflected his nearly inhuman rage. Neji turned away from him and felt something pierce his back.

Tenten was frankly screaming now. "Just _wait, _can't you _wait _and talk to us for just a minute _please, __sensei!__"_

Gai had caught up with him again, and this time Neji attempted to block the strike (a very stupid move, with Gai) and nearly got his arm snapped in half.

The limb was in so much pain that he didn't even try to dodge the next hit, which caught him firmly in the stomach, took the air out of his lungs, and knocked him out of the tree and careening into the underbrush. There were shuriken lodged in his back – when had that happened, he wondered? – and he landed flat on them, driving them right up into his flesh.

He very nearly blacked out, but then he was quickly brought back to the present when Gai's face appeared, hovering over him. _He__'__s __going __to __kill __me, _Neji thought in stunned silence. _He__'__s __actually __going __to __kill __me._

"Gai-sensei, _please! _Look at him! Look at how he's bleeding! You're not going to _kill _him – you don't want to _kill _him, do you?"

And for the first time he was aware that she was physically intervening, trying to push Gai away from him, but Gai brushed her off, and, instead, picked Neji up from the forest floor by his throat.

Neji's next moment of awareness came when Gai slammed him back against another tree, fingers still clamped tightly around his throat. Neji, knowing it was useless but unable to help it, clawed at the grip on his neck.

"You…" Gai mumbled, staring at him with utter fury. "_You__…_"

Tenten was still yelling, but Neji could only pay attention to one of them at a time.

"You… How could you… To take advantage of your _teammate, _someone you should be _protecting__…_"

"He doesn't needto protect me – he's not taking advantage – if anything, I – please, please, please stop!"

"I suppose you thought it would be amusing to string her along? I thought you were better than that – I thought you were above those piddling little rich-boy games…"

"PLEASE, SENSEI. Let us explain. It's not what you think! _He__'__s __going __to __choke_!"

Gai was actually shaking with anger. Neji could feel the heat of chakra pouring out of him, overwhelming all rational thought. He'd never before realized the true power that killer intent could have.

Gai must have noticed that he was starting to lose consciousness, because he let his grip slack just a little. "What can you possibly say to justify your actions? What could make you any less reprehensible?"

Neji heaved breaths as hard as he could through the still firm grip on his neck. There was no way he could speak, but he tried.

Gai slammed his head back into the tree trunk again. "I would like nothing better than to choke the life out of you – to watch you die, slowly," Gai said.

Tenten shrieked. "_Sensei, _please, you've already beaten him, can't you just listen to me for a second? You can't… you can't really want… don't you see what you're doing to your own student?"

"I disown you as my student," Gai said coldly, his gaze on Neji's face unwavering.

Neji wasn't sure how he did it – possibly Gai's grip had slackened when Tenten spoke – but he found his voice. After coughing briefly, he managed to say, "We're in love."

He could feel Gai's body go completely still.

Tenten's voice, when he heard it again, seemed to be coming from somewhere very far away. "Let him go. Please, sensei, let him go."

All at once, the hand released him. He was able to support himself on one leg enough to lower his aching body to the ground. As soon as he was on it, the pain of his wounds seemed to wash over him all at once. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, grabbing at consciousness. Gai-sensei certainly had not held anything back.

The rest he heard, rather than saw. He heard the sound of a sharp hit against flesh, and Tenten's shrill voice. "It's _me _you should be mad at, _me _you should be punishing. I got myself into this situation." He could hear the quaver in her voice and knew it meant that she was about to cry. He'd become familiar with the sound. "But you're not going to admit it, and you're not going to punish me, because you think… No, because you still feel guilty. You still think it's your fault, don't you? Even though you had absolutely nothing to do with it. I told you back then and I'll tell you again now, _it __wasn__'__t __your __fault._ It wasn't your clan. And if it had been your clan, _your _family, I know you never would have let it happen."

Neji didn't hear anything for a minute, and he couldn't help wondering where his sensei was looking.

"I'm not a little girl anymore," she said. "I can protect myself. You taught me how to do that. In fact if it weren't for you I never would have…"

She trailed off and didn't finish the sentence. It was quiet again for a minute.

He heard his sensei turn away from the scene and begin to walk away, into the forest, back toward the training field. "Get him cleaned up," Gai-sensei said coldly as he left.

A few moments later, he felt Tenten stoop down next to him, on the side of his unbroken arm. She lifted him gingerly to his feet again, and together they began the long journey to the hospital.

* * *

><p>They didn't speak all the way there. He was drifting in and out of consciousness the whole time, and only realized they had made it when he heard Tenten say, "Training accident," by way of succinct explanation, to a person who must have been a nurse or something. Shortly thereafter he was hefted onto a stretcher, and they were kind enough to drug him into unconsciousness before they started to put him back together.<p>

He woke up later to find himself in one of the recovery rooms. Tenten was sitting next to him, still, and when she saw his open eyes she nervously looked away. He did, too. He looked at the other shinobi in beds lining the walls, at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, at her hands, which were picking at his bedspread. Anywhere but her eyes.

"Good, you're awake," she said. "You had a pretty good concussion, you know. The nurse says you need to take two days off training and come back to the hospital if your arm hurts, and especially if you get a headache."

"Have I been out long?"

"Only a few hours. It's dinner time."

Their eyes accidentally met for a second, and then they both looked down. "Neji…" she started, trailing off uneasily.

"What is it?"

"Did you mean it? Are we in love?"

He didn't know how to answer that.

It was impossible to say what love was, because everyone seemed to have a different definition, and they were all very subjective. He understood that it was supposed to mean more than purely physical desire for another person. But he didn't know what it was supposed to feel like or look like, and he didn't know if he was the kind of person that was even capable of recognizing it, because in spite of everything, he was still, essentially, very fucked-up.

"I don't know," he said honestly.

She finally looked at him voluntarily, and he wondered if she was seeing in him the same things he was seeing in her. Fear, mostly. Confusion – much of that as well. There were no easy answers. There were no simple stories.

But at least he could count on one thing. As with most of the other challenges he'd faced in his young adult life, they were in it together.

* * *

><p>It amazed him, in retrospect, that Gai-sensei hadn't known. Everyone else in Konoha had known, apparently.<p>

Neji was slightly bitter over the fact that Tenten had escaped punishment from their sensei, at least until they learned that Gai-sensei had gone to speak with Hiashi, at which point she suffered utter mortification that seemed to eclipse mere physical pain. Luckily, they had such a long history of being embarrassed by Gai-sensei that she was more or less over it by the next day.

Neji decided he didn't want to know what had been discussed and didn't ask his uncle about it. He noticed a very small change afterward, though. Gai's coldness toward him started to abate. Although the man still couldn't stand to look at him, he didn't insist on dissolving the team, which Neji had been afraid of. It made missions a challenge when your captain wouldn't look at you or give you orders directly, but Team Gai worked so well together that they didn't have to talk much anyway.

* * *

><p>They were lying on her bed, like they did most nights now when they were both in the village. It was high summer and hot. The flat sheet and blankets were crumpled on the floor. Both of them were sprawled on their backs, Tenten with all her limbs splayed out, because it was too hot and humid to be proper, and it wasn't as if Tenten had ever cared to be anyway. He wasn't quite as wanton – he had one hand rested on his chest and the other trapped under her neck.<p>

The bedroom window was open and he could hear sounds of the village from the street outside, just a few floors down. There were crickets and frogs, the sound of a baby crying, clumsy civilian footsteps through the leaves, wind chimes. (Not that the wind helped. Even the breeze was hot.)

They sometimes talked, after. It was never about the same thing, and it was never anything either would say in the daylight. He wasn't sure when this act had become something relaxing, but it was, somehow, even for her now, and she could tell him things afterward that she would never share with him otherwise.

"She could have fixed him," Tenten said, out of nowhere.

"What?"

"My uncle. After our fight. When Gai-sensei brought him back to the hospital. Tsunade told me later. It was well within her capabilities to… put him back together, so to speak. She chose not to, and let my clan believe it wasn't a choice."

The way she could talk about it now, calm and removed, sometimes unnerved him, but he thought it was probably a good sign for her. "Hm. Physicians are not supposed to do that – let their emotions affect their work."

"It wasn't a choice she made as a physician, it was one she made as Hokage. She was… protecting her people."

Neji breathed deeply, feeling pleasant and sleepy. One of the reasons they could talk so easily afterwards, he knew, was that they were both always so spent. Their emotional energy was all used up. "I used to want to kill him so badly," Neji said. "Like Gai wanted to, I suppose."

"You don't anymore?"

"No. I have thought about it. Now I understand better – it is crueler to let him live as he is than to let him die."

She laughed silently – he could feel the vibration through the mattress. "Are you saying you'd rather die than never have sex again?"

He couldn't help but smile. "I think so, yes."

She sighed softly.

He reached his free hand over his body and searched for hers. Because of the way they were positioned he could barely reach, and she was too languid to make an effort. He ended up with just the tips of his fingers curled through hers, and she closed her fist around them and sighed again. And somewhere in between the wind stirring the curtains and Tenten cooling off and rolling toward him for warmth, he started to fall asleep.

* * *

><p>End.<p> 


End file.
